Motivation to Lose Weight: How Do I Stay Motivated?

Do you have trouble maintaining your motivation to lose weight? The problem many people have is that they’ve been struggling with their weight for many years. So the whole subject has become stressful to them, and they go through cycles of trying and then giving up. How can you stay motivated in the long run?

The first thing you have to do to improve your motivation is a bit of a paradox. You have to stop worrying about your lack of motivation! Stress is actually at the heart of many, if not most, problems, both physical and emotional. Your stress about your weight and how you look and feel is actually making it harder for you to stick to an effective weight loss plan. Now, don’t get stressed about that! The first thing that you want to do is relax and accept where you are right now.

Self-acceptance is the first, all-important step in achieving any goal. The fact is, you are where you are. You can’t change it. You can only take control of the present moment, which then becomes the future. If this is difficult for you, practice some techniques to induce relaxation. Meditation and yoga can be helpful. Relaxing music or visualization recordings can also be good for this.

The next step is to focus on what you’d like to accomplish. What’s crucial is to keep your mind on your desired outcome, not on what you have to do to get there. If your goal is to lose forty pounds, imagine how you will look and feel when you’ve reached this goal. If you find yourself thinking about how you’ll have to deprive yourself or how hard you’re going to have to work exercising, relax and try to return to the desired outcome.

The problem many people run into when it comes to losing weight, or any other goal, is that they get overwhelmed thinking about all the steps they have to take to achieve something. Your mind tends to put all of these steps together and you feel as if you have to do it all at once. This is not the case. You only have to live one moment at a time. This, in fact, is all you can do.

To lose weight, or achieve anything in life, you have to take certain actions. Or stop doing things that take you in the opposite direction, as the case may be. In most cases, however, it’s not more information that you need. You probably already know what you have to do and not do to lose weight. What’s stopping you is not lack of information, or even lack of will power. It’s the way you’ve been focusing on the wrong side of the equation. The more you focus on where you want to be, and not on the difficult (at least as you probably think of it) journey to get there, the faster you’ll arrive!