How I Lost Weight With No Willpower (And Why Motivation Doesn’t Matter)

When people hear that I lost 100 pounds and kept it off for over a decade, they assume I must have superhuman willpower. I used to assume that too. I thought the people who succeeded were simply stronger, more disciplined, and less flawed than me.

It’s funny looking back now, because willpower is the last thing I had. I was obese for 25 years. I failed hundreds of diets. I binge ate like it was a full-time job. I dropped out of college six times. I believed every nonsense weight loss myth going.

Willpower didn’t save me. Motivation didn’t save me. In fact, relying on motivation was the reason I stayed stuck for so long.

I spent most of my childhood trying to lose weight.

Motivation bursts and Monday promises

For most of my teens and early twenties, I lived off motivation bursts.

I’d get fed up with myself, swear I was turning everything around, and plan a brand new diet for Monday. Monday became this magical day where I’d somehow wake up as a different person.

The weekend before? A disaster every time. I’d binge because “diet starts Monday”. By Monday I already felt sick, guilty, and behind before the day even started.

I repeated that cycle for 15 years.

Slip once, panic, quit, wait for a new motivation burst, restart next Monday. Over and over.

I kept waiting to wake up as a new person on Monday. It never happened.

The binge eating mastermind with zero structure

I didn’t just binge eat. I organised it.

I’d shop-hop so it didn’t look like I was buying a full family’s weekly junk supply. I’d order from two takeaways on the same night and hope the delivery drivers didn’t meet outside. I had a pre binge checklist, mixing sweet and savoury like I was preparing for a tasting menu.

Then I’d sit in the loosest clothes I owned and eat until I was uncomfortable, wait twenty minutes, and squeeze more in.

And every time, I thought the problem was motivation. I thought everyone else was simply better at controlling themselves.

What I didn’t understand was that I had built a whole system around binge eating. Motivation was never going to fix that.

My binges were planned better than my diets.

The years I tried everything except what actually works

When you don’t understand weight loss, motivation becomes dangerous. It pushes you into extreme plans because they feel exciting.

Here’s just a short sample of what “motivated Damien” used to do:

Lipotrim. Three separate times. Two shakes a day while working ten hours on a construction site.

Electric ab belts. One actually burned out from overuse.

Five hundred crunches before school and another five hundred after, because I thought fat moved out of the way if your abs were strong enough.

Litres of Pu-erh tea because someone online said it “burned fat.”

Acai berry capsules. Random fat burners I bought off the internet without a clue what was in them.

Gym workouts followed by huge binges because I believed the myth that exercise keeps your metabolism “spiked” for hours.

I wasn’t lazy. I was drowning in misinformation. Motivation made me feel powerful for a few hours, then abandoned me the second life became stressful or inconvenient.

Rock bottom and the turning point

Christmas 2013 was the lowest I’d ever felt.

Another failed attempt. More weight gained. More stretch marks. More proof (in my head) that I wasn’t strong enough.

That Christmas I accepted that I’d be overweight forever.

Then January rolled around. I got an email from a local gym promoting a weight loss competition. Something about the word “competition” hit the petty part of my brain. If I was battling strangers, maybe I could stick to it.

I joined. In eight weeks, I lost 20 pounds. And for the first time ever, I genuinely enjoyed training.

But then I stalled completely for six months.

Five days a week in the gym, two hours a day, and absolutely no progress. Old me would’ve quit. This time I got curious instead of dramatic.

I started learning.

I came across energy balance for the first time. Calories in versus calories out. It sounds basic now, but at 25 it was life changing. Suddenly everything made sense. My hangover Sundays alone were wiping out my entire weekly deficit.

Once I understood this, everything finally started moving again.

I wasn’t failing because I was weak. I was failing because I didn’t understand what I was doing.

What low-willpower weight loss actually looked like

The real solution was extremely boring.

Not motivational. Not inspiring. Not impressive.

Just simple, repeatable habits.

Here’s what it looked like for me:

I ate the same breakfasts most days. The same few lunches. Not exciting, but predictable and low effort.

I tracked my calories most of the time. Not obsessively. Not perfectly. Just consistently enough to know what I was doing.

I stopped relying on perfect days. Bad days happened. Sometimes whole bad weekends happened. I didn’t quit over them anymore.

I kept binge foods out of the house. If I wanted them, I had to go out and get them. Half the time I couldn’t be bothered, which helped.

I kept moving in whatever way I could. Even when chronic pain later made things harder, I stayed consistent in the ways my body allowed.

I accepted December would always be chaos. I still gain 4 to 8 pounds every Christmas. The difference now is I don’t panic. January is for cleaning it up.

None of this required motivation. It required less drama and fewer assumptions that tomorrow-me would magically be better than today-me.

The boring stuff is what worked.

Keeping it off without big speeches or big promises

Losing the weight wasn’t easy, but keeping it off has been harder. My chronic pain, fatigue, working life, and stress made everything more complicated.

I still love junk food. I still sometimes get the urge to binge. I still get things wrong. But I don’t spiral the way I used to.

I have systems now. I have habits now. And none of them depend on waking up highly motivated.

I still track most of the time. I still eat fairly simple meals. I still do the movement I can manage, even on days my back gives out. And when I have a bad day, I don’t tell myself to restart on Monday. I just move on.

For most of my life, I thought I was failing because I had no willpower. Looking back, the real problem was that I kept trying to build long term change using short term emotion.

Motivation is a spark. Useful to start something, useless for keeping it going.

The things that changed my life were small, realistic habits that worked on the days I felt good and the days I felt awful.

Progress comes from ordinary Tuesdays, not perfect Mondays.

Closing thoughts

If you feel like a failure because you can’t stay motivated, you’re not alone. I lived in that cycle for most of my life. It wasn’t because I lacked strength. It was because I was trying to rely on something that was never designed to last.

You don’t need willpower to lose weight. You don’t need motivation to keep it off. You need simple habits you can repeat even on the days you feel tired, stressed, overwhelmed, or fed up.

That’s all I did.

And if someone like me - someone who struggled for 25 years, binge ate, quit every plan, believed every myth, and failed hundreds of times - can lose 100 pounds and keep it off, then you can make real progress too.

Not by trying harder.

By making it easier to keep going on the days you don’t feel motivated at all.

Start Your Transformation