Your Motivation To Lose Weight – Part 2

If you missed Part 1 here is a quick link to Finding Your Motivation to Lose Weight – Part 1.

Love Yourself Today Just Like You Are

You must love yourself today, just like you are. This is important because for long term success you must accept who you are.  If you start from the point of disliking who you are that’s a recipe for failure.  When I started my journey to lose 100 pounds, I made a shift mentally.  I figured out that although I was overweight, that didn’t make me a bad person, or a failure in anyway.  I spent time looking at who I was as a person, I looked at my successes and acknowledged my failures and decided that I was a great person, I decided to accept who I was at this moment.  Remember what you focus on expands, and if you focus on how out of shape you are that will expand in your life.  So I changed my “focus” my focus went from how fat I was, and being disgusted about how I got that way to lets take some action and create the body that I want.  I did a speech at Toastmaster called “The Quest to See My Abs!” People laughed and really enjoyed it, but this truly is one of my foundational goals concerning my weight loss, “I want to see my abs!” even if its just for a month.   Remember you have fat but are not fat.  I truly believe that most of us have a picture in our mind of what we look like, and if you don’t change that picture during your weight loss journey I don’t think you’ll have long term success.  If you don’t change the picture in your mind subconsciously you will work towards trying to match that picture in your mind, and end up right back where you started or worse – I’ve been there and done that.

How to Change the Picture In Your Head

This isn’t my first time on the weight lose journey, so when I got serious this time I went back and found some pictures of how HOT I use to look when I lost weight before. I took this picture and taped it to my bathroom mirror, so I see this image all the time.

Another technique is to imagine what you’ll look like and how you will fill once you reach your goal. Really imagine it, think about how much more energy you might have, think about the new clothes you might buy, or the new activities you might try because you are healthier, lighter and stronger.  This helps to change your mental picture.

Remember that the Proper Diet is 70% of the Weight Lose Equation

Several years back the very popular book Body for Life by Bill Phillips, took the health and fitness world by storm.  I remember deciding to following this exercise and diet plan as I sat in McDonalds eating a Big Mac combo meal.  In it Bill set forth a pretty straight forward diet and exercise program that lots of people had great success with, I was one of those people.

The book was also connected to a Body Transformation contest where you could win at one point a car, cash and other cool stuff.  All you had to do was enter the contest, take a before and after picture and complete a 12 week program.  I entered the contest several times, and my transformation from 275 to 200 (size 48 pants to size 38) took more like 72 weeks, I was so proud to receive my Body for Life T-shirt and certificate of completion.  What I learned from that process was that with the proper diet, weight loss is definitely achievable, during those 72 weeks I actually got injured and was’t able to workout, but continued to lose weight.  Even now using the Ketogenic Diet I am not exercising a lot, several months back I stopped on purpose because I wanted to see what would happen to my weight loss doing Keto and no exercise–I’ve continued to lose weight.  I’ve turned my body from burning carbs/sugar as fuel to burning fat (ketosis), and I still have lots of it to go.

Your diet is the foundation of any weight loss effort, if you don’t clean that up you are just fooling yourself.  A good diet is about choices.  When I was using a calorie restricted diet using the MyFitnessPal phone app (which I highly recommend), I had a set amount of calories per day.  This helped me begin to make decisions about what went into my body, or how I was going to spend these calories.  One of the things that easily went away for me was bread, especially buns for hamburgers and hot dogs, those are easily 200+ calories.  If I was going to give up 200+ calories i’d rather have a glazed donut which was roughly the same calories. Get your diet right if your serious about losing weight.

Here is a good 2015, article from the New York Times: “To Lose Weight, Eating Less is Far More Important Than Exercising More.

Don’t Be Affraid to Switch Things Up If They Aren’t Working

I lost approximately 25 pounds just counting calories, and exercising and then I hit a plateau where I got stuck for several months.  My weight would change slightly up or down from week to week and it was very frustrating.  In the past this type of plateau would have probably stopped me and I would have quit, but this time instead of giving up, I decided to make adjustments and continue to move forward.  Making these types of adjustments is really part of how we learn as humans.  When we learn any new skill we struggle at first and even fail, then we adjust something and try again with more success, once our brain figures out the correct sequence of actions then the new skill becomes imprinted mentally.  Losing weight is just like learning any new skill, you start with a plan, you have success but then you fall or it stops working, you make adjustments until you find a new path to your destination.  I did that when I switched to the Keto lifestyle, the benefits and science behind it was too much for me to ignore.  Don’t be afraid to make adjustments on your journey to lose weight.  I’m in the process of doing that now as I look to begin incorporating exercise back into my lifestyle.  I am considering a using a standard ketogenic diet but also incorporating weight lifting as prescribed by the folks at KetoGains.com.

Don’t Quit!

No matter what you do, don’t quit.  We all have bad days, we all at some point will fall off of our eating plans–so what!  What you did yesterday is gone, so is what you did the day before that, you can’t change those mistakes but you can learn from them and move forward.  Losing a significant amount of weight takes time, energy and effort.  Learn to enjoy the journey.

In closing I wanted to talk about a book that I recently listened to called “You Are A Bad Ass: How to Stop Doubting Your Greatness and Start Living an Awesome Life, by Jen Sincero.  One of the many things that I learned from this book is from a quote.

“Making lots of money, or losing weight or any other major thing is really not about what you get from it;  it’s about the person you become during the process.”

 

Jen Sincero

Enjoy your weight loss journey, enjoy your life, and remember to love yourself.

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