The first step to losing weight isn?t changing your diet and it isn?t exercising. Both of those come after.
The first step to losing weight and achieving any goals you have, weight related or not, is motivating yourself to take action in the first place.
It can be difficult to learn how to motivate yourself. However,finding your weight loss inspiration could be the first step to gaining your motivation.
When asked how to find motivation it?s a hard question to answer.
Every person is different.
Although, one person only needs to look at weight loss motivation quotes, another might need to visualise how they?ll look when they?ve hit their goals.
What Works for You?
The first step to completing the first step is asking yourself what you think will motivate you.
It can be difficult to know how to be motivated, but motivation isn?t something tangible.
It?s abstract, a feeling that can?t be measured by any kind of test.
It?s that burning desire to get up and do what you need to do.
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Motivational Videos
For some people, motivational videos can be a godsend.
The visuals and audio that can be found in videos on sites like YouTube can give people that burst of desire and energy to get up and do what they need to so they can lose the weight.
For others, the videos won?t provoke any kind of motivation or desire, meaning another method can be useful.
Visualising how you?ll look after losing the weight can be amazingly useful.
Trying to imagine how your face will look when you?re a lot thinner can be all you need to start the fire inside to start losing the weight.
If the face alone isn?t going to be enough, imagine how you?ll look when you lose the weight and can fit into the clothes that they don?t sell in your current size.
It can be a big motivator to know if you lose the weight, you?ll be able to fit into the dress or jeans you?ve wanted to wear for a long time but haven?t been slim enough to do so.
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Weight Loss Inspitational Quotes
Weight loss inspiration quotes can be a great source of motivation for some people.
When people think of inspirational quotes, we mainly think of the mainstays that came from great people from history.
A good motivational quote to get you acting today is one from Mahatma Gandhi, which is ?The future depends on what we do in the present?.
What you do in the here and now can make a massive difference to where you?ll be in six months.
Starting today to jog increasing distances for the next 6 months will make a massive difference to your weight loss.
The future you is depending on you to start making the effort today and stick with it.
What works for you can be anything, because it?s just for you and all about you.
Don?t be afraid to try new things to motivate yourself. Don?t be afraid to do some more research for exact methods on how to motivate yourself.
Discipline
Motivation isn?t something that always needs to be built up from nothing every day.
It?s something that can be built upon every day to get you exercising and dieting with confidence and contentment.
Building the discipline to lose the weight is difficult, but it?s not something that always requires focus.
Every day you stick to your diet and your exercise regimen, the stronger your discipline will become.
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Set Short-term Goals
A good trick to start your weight loss motivation and discipline development journey is to set out smaller goals with shorter timeframes than your bigger goals.
By creating smaller stepping stones on the way to your bigger goals, you?ll get the nice hit of dopamine that comes with achieving small goals, with your brain getting used to the little doses of dopamine that come from ticking off small goals.
The bigger dopamine hits and the happiness from the results that come from consistently hitting smaller goals for a long period of time will help maintain and reinforce the motivation and discipline you?ve been working on.
Habits help discipline.
Creating beneficial habits, like making your bed each and every morning, will help you to start to create more habits.
When you?ve got enough beneficial habits from any aspect of your life, you can start focusing on forming habits related to weight loss.
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Make a Plan, Stick to it
To say that you?re going to set an ideal weight and get to it without any kind of planning, for most people, is ludicrous.
Some can do it, but most of us need to plan it out first. By planning out your weight loss journey and setting yourself goals, it?ll be easier to motivate yourself.
You?ll be more motivated to go for a 15 minute jog every day for 3 weeks than you will to run 315 minutes over 3 weeks.
Create a realistic weight loss target for each week or fortnight.
Monthly weight loss targets can be hard to hit. Long targets can leave you feeling disillusioned if you miss a target. It means that you need to work a lot harder to hit it next month.
That demotivation can cause some people to stop their weight loss journey altogether.
Watch and listen to motivational people
If you find a motivational video, audio clip or quote that really gets you going, then you should make sure that every morning before you try and get up to do anything, you spend some time really paying attention to it.
This will help pump you up and get you ready to do what you need to in order to get to where you want to be.
Remind yourself of your goals whenever possible.
For some this means sticking sticky notes all around the house with your different goals, which need to be small ones you can feasibly complete within a week.
When you complete them, take the sticky note off wherever it is, fold it up and put it in the bin.
This will help reinforce the pleasure of completing the task. For those more into the digital reminders, you can create a to-do list on your phone and mark things as completed. It will have the same reinforcing effect.
Get a Weight Loss Buddy, Hold Each Other Accountable
By using a buddy system, you can help motivate each other.
When you have someone else who?s counting on you to be there for them and counting on you to stick with it, then it can motivate you to do better just so you can be there for your buddy.
A buddy doesn?t have to be a friend, it can be a family member or someone you know from work, the gym or your family.
The buddy system is useful in multiple aspects, including having someone to exercise with who can push you further, and someone you can share a meal with who will be having similarly healthy options even in a restaurant setting.
This is useful if you?re looking for a judgement free meal, especially if your friends usually order really unhealthy options like barbecue foods that usually have a high sucrose sauce.
Meditation
A highly underrated practice, meditation has many benefits that are great for recovering lost motivation when life has taken it out of you.
If you?re asking yourself questions like ?why am I so unmotivated?? you may find that after a meditation session, you?re more honest with yourself when you answer.
The clarity that meditation can bring once learned properly is something that most people are completely unaware of. Another joy of meditation is that it?s impossible to completely master.
That means that you can take the same perspective as Buddhist monks that meditate for hours at a time every day for years, which is that even without mastery, it still provides clarity.
Eventually you?ll learn to take the same approach with weight loss. Even without mastering your weight loss goal instantly, the patience learned from meditation can help greatly with discipline.
Know that Patience is Important
The key thing to remember is that patience is just as important as motivation.
You need to apply your patience to the right area of your weight loss journey.
By that I mean to your long term goals. If you don?t hit your first few targets on the way to your longer-term targets, maybe you need to re-evaluate how many steps you need to have on your way to your long term goal.
Keep a few inspirational weight loss quotes in the back of your mind before weighing yourself, so you can try and protect your motivation from taking a hit if you don?t manage your target this week.
Try to kickstart your weight loss
For me personally there is no bigger motivation to keep losing weight when I see the results. Maybe what your bosy needs is a diet that will help kickstart the weight loss be that in pounds, using a string or even fitting into an item of clothing.
A few diets you could try are the:
The Boiled Egg Diet: Lose 20 pounds in 2 weeks.
Lose 20lbs in 2 weeks with the Heart Healthy Diet
One of these diets could potentially all you need to keep motivated
The bottom line
Ultimately, the motivation and discipline you need to lose weight regularly, consistently, and permanently, requires motivation, lifestyle changes and the discipline to stick to your changes.
If you don?t hit targets, use the motivation inside you to keep going.
