You know that you will look and feel better if you could just maintain a healthy weight, but it is so hard to find the motivation to lose weight and actually keep it off indefinitely. We all know that fad diets don’t work, but often we aren’t so good at developing an effective weight loss program and remaining consistent with it.
The following techniques will help you learn how to keep motivated to lose weight once and for all.
Build Evidence against Yourself
One way to build up your motivation to make life changing decisions and take control of your weight is to collect evidence to build a case against yourself for losing weight. The purpose behind this is to prove the case that you urgently need to drop some weight, and you can do that by using pitcures.
Take a few photographs of yourself as you are at the moment, and then collect pictures of yourself as you were in the past. Try to get as many images as you can that feature you at different ages and different weights. You can then arrange them on a table in order of time or stick them down to a paper or poster board.
You’ll find that it’s very difficult to deny how overweight you are when you are looking at yourself from this outer viewpoint. Do you represent the person you know you are inside? Do you really want to go back to the days of being healthy and thin?
Focus On Fitness Too
When you want to lose weight it is easy to forget the bigger picture and only pay attention to the scale. You can motivate yourself to lowering your weight can be achieved by setting fitness goals that have nothing to do with what you weigh. For instance, sign up for an upcoming 10k event and decide to walk it. Other goals may be to work up to doing a specific number of chin ups, sit ups, or jumping jacks. You could even plan to build up to doing one handed push ups, for example.
You can train to run if the event is far enough away and you can reasonably get into good enough shape to be able to handle it. What you should definitely NOT do however is set yourself up for disappointment with unrealistic targets, so make sure what you set out to do is achievable. Doing so will ensure you maintain your motivation to lose weight in an effective manner.
Make Use Of Friendly Competition
Bring some friends on board and arrange a friendly competition. Everyone can pitch in to purchase a nice reward that will be given to the winner.
If you can’t get others in real life to do this there are plenty of online weight loss forums that often have many contests happening all the time.
Buy That Smaller Dress And Use It As An Incentive
Perhaps there is a certain peice of clothing that you really want to be able to wear? Maybe it’s a smaller sundress with strappy sandals or a pair of short shorts without cellulite and fat jiggling out underneath. Regardless of what it is, purchase it in the size you would ultimately like to be put it up somewhere you will see it every day.
You should put it on from time to time for a visual reminder of the progress you have made!
Notice that most of these tools for getting motivated to lose weight require forward thinking. You take action now because you want something better for yourself in the future, rather than focusing on what you have to give up now.
This article was written by Mike Roberts of getting motivated to lose weight. For more from Mike see how to keep motivated to lose weight.
