How To Stay Motivated On Your Weight Loss Journey
Whether you want to lose a few extra pounds from last year's holiday season or your scale has reached new and disturbing heights, you might find yourself deciding to focus on trimming down. Most of us have been there or are there. No matter how much weight you need to lose, it feels like a momentous task. The scale seems to move at the same glacial pace if you need to lose five pounds as it does if you need to lose 50 pounds. The slow burn of fat can drain your patience and motivation.
It's no secret that losing weight is challenging, but there has to be a way for us to do it. The right motivation can help a lot.
Staying in a motivated mindset is a key factor in losing weight. It's important to discover and use ways to stay motivated through all the obstacles you face to reach your weight loss goal. Our team has thought and talked about this, and we've come up with some ideas to help you achieve and maintain the motivation you need to take the weight off in a healthy way without losing your mind and weight loss mojo.
Why Have You Lost Motivation During Previous Weight Loss Journeys?
Perhaps you've never put on excess weight before. If so, that's fantastic, but it's also understandable that you face some challenges trying to reach your healthy or ideal weight. It's just as easy to understand why you struggle with weight loss if you've launched one, more, or many weight loss journeys in the past. You know the struggle and that it becomes worse with each subsequent journey and as we get older. Our slowing metabolism as we fight to get fit after 50 seems to have it out for us.
But think about previous efforts to lose weight, and consider what went wrong. In many cases, people reach weight loss success only to lose motivation to maintain the same restrictive diet they ate to reach their goal weight and svelte figure or chiseled physique, shares Shape. Unfortunately, merely reaching within 10 pounds of goal weight is often elusive to the most dedicated dieters trying to enjoy healthy aging. And we can likely chalk much of the shortfalls up to some issue with motivation, whether you're using the wrong motivation for you or you lost focus using something that worked.
It's demoralizing, especially if you had started to see progress before everything came to a grinding halt, whether due to reaching a weight loss plateau or because you derailed your own efforts through increased cheat days and other self-sabotaging behaviors.
Engaging in self-sabotage isn't often a conscious choice but more a force of habit or the result of some underlying social distortion surrounding food because so many of us engage, or have engaged in it. Some nutritional miscues are so ingrained that we don't recognize them until it's too late; after we've regained several pounds and lost all motivation.
What do you think happened that thwarted your motivation and success during previous weight loss efforts? Maybe you chose the wrong motivation for you or your life, such as trying to fit into an impressive outfit for an upcoming 30th or more high school reunion, or you didn't find the community support you needed to make weight loss a priority.
Let's learn more about weight loss motivation tips below.
Determine Why You Want to Lose Weight
As mentioned above, our reasons for wanting to lose weight can sometimes skew to the superficial. We see a great outfit or business suit piece, and we can imagine our slimmer selves fitting right into it. Our reality is our slimmer selves plus 20-30 pounds. You might feel demoralized at first, but as you continue thinking about how great you'll look, you start to devise a "weight loss plan." Unfortunately, that plan might only focus on the suit or outfit without looking at the larger picture for your need to lose weight for other factors, such as healthy aging and staying fit after 50 for yourself and your family.
It's essential to choose a goal for losing weight that helps motivate sustainability as much as passionate desire. Our lives aren't movies, and we can't base our ideal bodies on celebrities. Trust me, we all struggle with this truth of gravity and our body's natural tendency to slow and even break down to some degree. You can't fight nature and chronological age, but you can lose weight according to realistic reasoning while using a realistic plan that works for you at your age and fitness level. You'll find it's much easier to lose weight when we accept reality and come up with the right reasons for you to lose weight.
Here are a few reasons you might want to lose weight that features built-in motivation:
Stay healthy and active to support and enjoy your family, including children and grandchildren.
Increase your physical stamina to perform everyday tasks effectively, comfortably, and without fatigue or injury.
Prevent, manage, reduce, or eliminate health concerns often associated with aging and excess weight, such as high blood pressure, diabetes, and high cholesterol.
Feel comfortable in your everyday clothes and goal outfits for special milestones.
Gain confidence no matter what you wear or what you're doing.
Enhance your mood and outlook on life.
Boost energy to become a self-sustaining resource to achieve your daily and long-term life goals.
Manage or reduce aches and pains, such as joint or lower back pain.
Improve your sleep quality and reduce stress for a better quality of life and longer life expectancy.
As you can see, there are plenty of deep and enriching reasons to choose to lose weight. Most of these reasons are dynamic and add more to your life than unrealistic goals. Determining and connecting with the right motivation will drive weight reduction and fitness success organically. You'll still need to maintain focus and avoid daily temptations to fall off the wagon and into a bout of stress eating, but with the right motivation, you can refocus and get back on track more easily.
Pick a Weight Control Plan That Fits Your Lifestyle
You probably realize by now that if a weight control plan doesn't fit your lifestyle, it isn't likely to work. At least not in the long run.
The question is how to pick the right weight loss plan for you to fit into your routine. Here are a few questions to ask yourself to help determine the right plan to keep you motivated and lose weight at a realistic and steady pace.
Are You Considering a Plan That Promotes Proper Nutrition That Helps You Thrive?
You don't want to go on a fad diet. If you go on an extremely restrictive, low-calorie diet, you might experience a quick, sudden, and demoralizing crash and burn that sets you off on a counterproductive eating frenzy. Or worse, if you stick to it, you might miss out on important nutrients, deplete your energy, and develop an illness you stood no chance of experiencing in the first place.
We know it's difficult to identify a healthy, balanced diet these days with the diet industry's confusing and sometimes conflicting reports on veganism, keto, and a host of other diets and eating regimens. It's little wonder that we're all left scratching our heads and wondering what we should eat to achieve and maintain a healthy weight. We came up with a primer to help you dispel healthy food myths and come up with a diet plan that you can stick with to thrive to achieve your healthy aging, weight reduction, and fitness goals.
Are You Setting Goals Aside from Losing Weight?
You don't want to make your weight-loss efforts the central focus of your life. While it's important for your health, it shouldn't eclipse every other aspect of your life. If you do that, you're likely doomed to lose motivation because it's simply too much pressure to place on your body. Let's face it, losing weight takes longer than any of us like, and it's often filled with detours and plateaus that you have to find ways to overcome. If you place a huge amount of pressure on this one goal, you might find yourself engaging in unintended self-sabotage to give yourself a break from self-induced restriction, stress, and outright hunger.
First, make sure to add in an exercise plan to help support your weight reduction efforts and feel better while doing it. You don't have to hit the gym hard or anything. Just get up daily and take a 45-minute to one-hour walk to start your day on a positive, active note. Contemplate how you will face food and life struggles. Exercise certainly helps improve your fitness, but it can also help as a mindful and contemplative time to focus on all your life goals.
Celebrate Your Successes
Healthline reminds us that weight loss doesn't happen overnight, so we need to find ways to stay motivated when it does happen. You also can't solely gauge success by the number on the scale. Remember to take body measurements and look at factors like health indicators, such as blood sugar readings, to get a big picture of how your health regimen is going. Losing weight and getting healthy is a compendium of factors, so don't put so much weight on weight itself.
With that in mind, celebrate scale and non-scale victories with non-food-related treats and treasures:
If you can no longer keep a pair of jeans from falling down over your hips, treat yourself to a new pair.
If you've graduated from brisk walking to jogging, buy yourself new running shoes or fitness apparel, or enter a local 5K race.
If you've hit an important number on the scale and have maintained it a few weeks, take a mini-vacation or weekend away to an area featuring hiking, swimming, canoeing, and other active and nature-oriented activities.
Non-food rewards are great ways to keep you motivated without adding temptation or triggers that some might experience with "treat or cheat meals." Keep up the motivation and momentum with non-food rewards that have meaning for you.
Don’t Aim for Perfection and Forgive Yourself
None of us are perfect, especially where losing weight is concerned. It's a strange and unfortunate sign of our times that we often readily adopt an "all or nothing" attitude. Humans are complex creatures, and we need to treat ourselves as such, allowing for occasional inconsistencies and outright bad eating days. The best thing you can do on such days is to evaluate what happened, forgive yourself, and move on. Letting go of missteps and treating yourself with kindness and forgiveness you'd gladly extend to others helps you stay motivated and move forward to get healthy.
Find Social Support
According to the Mayo Clinic, social support is a necessity for healthy weight loss. Building a supportive team into your healthy weight and fitness plan will drive your continued motivation and ongoing success.
If you need help gathering a supportive team to help you find and maintain the motivation you need to lose weight and keep it off, the Mighty Health team is here for you! Our team of nutritionists and fitness professionals is here to help you find the right balance to lose weight, get fit, enjoy more restful sleep, and live a healthy life at a healthy weight without feeling intense stress, pressure, or guilt over minor setbacks. We'll help you turn your health regimen into a positive process you're motivated to continue now and in the future.
