Maintaining A Healthy Weight: Tools For Keeping Motivated
Posted by: HealthyGirl / Category: Weight Loss
Despite knowing you want to lose weight, get a healthy body and maintain it, it can be hard to feel consistently motivated to lose weight and actually keep it off long term. We all know that it takes more than crash dieting and sporadic exercise, but often we aren’t so adept at sticking to effective weight loss plans that we know will ultimately work – IF we stick to it.
The following tips will help you learn how to keep motivated to lose weight once and for all.
Build A Case For Losing Weight: Collect Evidence
One way to enhance your motivation to make life changing decisions and get your weight under control is to collect evidence to build a case against yourself for losing weight. You want to prove the case that you urgently need to lose some weight, and you can accomplish that through pitcures.
Take a set of images of yourself as you are at the moment, and then find pictures of yourself from years past. Assemble as many photographs as possible that feature you at various different weights and times in your life. 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 outside viewpoint. Do you look like the person that inside you know you truly are? Do you really want to return to the days when you were healthy and thin?
Don’t Just Focus On The Scale
When you’re trying to drop weight it is easy to forget the bigger picture and only pay attention to the scale. A more balanced approach to get the scale moving by setting fitness goals that have nothing to do with weight. For example, sign up for an upcoming 5K event and plan to walk it. Additional targets may be to work up to doing a particular number of chin ups, sit ups, or jumping jacks. You could even plan to work up to doing one handed push ups, for example.
You can train to run if the race 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 failure with unrealistic targets, so make sure it is achievable. Doing so will ensure you maintain your motivation to lose weight in an effective manner.
Make Use Of Friendly Competition
Get some friends on board and create a friendly competition. You can all pitch in to purchase a cool reward that goes to the person who wins.
If its hard for you to find people in real life to do this there are plenty of online weight loss forums that often have a lot of competitions happening all the time.
Hang Up Your Dreams
Is there is a certain type of clothing that you really want to be able to put on? Maybe it’s a smaller summer dress with strappy sandals or a pair of short shorts without cellulite and fat jiggling out underneath. Whatever it is, purchase it in the size you ultimately want to get to hang it up somewhere you will see it daily.
You can also put it on from time to time as a visual reminder of the progress you are making!
Realize that most of these techniques for getting motivated to lose weight involve forward thinking. It’s about taking action now because you want something better for yourself in the future, as opposed to focusing on what you have to give up now.
Tags: health, motivation, Weight Loss, weight loss motivation
