The key to losing weight is willpower and eating fewer junk foods. That’s the thinking that many of us have about weight loss, but the CEO of Weight Watchers knows it’s a lot harder than that. And he’s learned that the hard way.

David Kirchhoff was clinically obese when he joined the management team at Weight Watchers in 2000. After nine years of yo-yo dieting, he finally had a breakthrough three years ago and was able to embrace the teachings of his own company.

He went on to lose 40 pounds. More importantly, he’s kept that weight off for three years and now has a new book on how he’s done it, called “Weight Loss Boss: How to Finally Win at Losing — and Take Charge in an Out-of-Control Food World.”

Kirchhoff says he started working on dropping some weight as soon as he joined Weight Watchers, but admits he may have been a bit of a slow learner.

“I was kind of doing it the wrong way the first nine years,” Kirchhoff told CTV’s Canada AM Monday from New York. “I was thinking about it as a dieter; I wasn’t thinking about lifestyle. The last three years is when I finally got my act together, which is what the book is about.”

The key for Kirchhoff was changing his daily routine to avoid temptation and embrace daily exercise, rather than focusing on quick-fix solutions such as dieting.

It was only after he made that important shift in his thinking that he finally had success with keeping the weight off. Kirchhoff says he wrote the book because he wanted to make the point that many people are going about weight loss the wrong way.

“We think of it as sort of going to war for a few months to lose the weight, exerting tremendous willpower and really girding down, which almost inevitably ends in disappointment, because whenever we get to the goal weight, the weight comes back,” he says.

Men are particularly susceptible to this kind of thinking, says Kirchhoff.

“Men can lose weight really fast. They have a tendency to go to war,” he says.

“The problem is that as soon as they get to the their goal, they’re in peace time and not sure what to do with themselves and they tend to go back to whatever they were doing before, as opposed to taking a more long-term behavioural approach.”

What Kirchhoff finally learned is to forget about willpower altogether. After reading about the science of food and taste, he realized that food can have a powerful effect on someone who struggles with their weight and that it’s often pointlessly frustrating to try to fight temptation.

“The far better strategy is to rewire our personal environment and establish new patterns and routines in our life so we don’t actually have to face temptation in the first place. It’s really the only way to keep weight off once we’ve lost it,” Kirchhoff says. From ctv.