Sunday, November 15, 2009

How do you stay motivated??

My husband often asks me how I stay motivated to consistently eat healthy and exercise when I do not always lose weight when doing so? The reason being, I am much happier when I live healthy. Here are also a few ways I have learned to stay motivated to keep up with a sometime hard lifestyle of being healthy...

1.Self-acceptance is the first, all-important step in achieving any goal. The fact is, you are where you are. You can’t change it. You can only take control of the present moment, which then becomes the future. If this is difficult for you, practice some techniques to induce relaxation. Meditation and yoga can be helpful. Relaxing music or visualization recordings can also be good for this.

2.The next step is to focus on what you’d like to accomplish. What’s crucial is to keep your mind on your desired outcome, not on what you have to do to get there. If your goal is to lose forty pounds, imagine how you will look and feel when you’ve reached this goal. If you find yourself thinking about how you’ll have to deprive yourself or how hard you’re going to have to work exercising, relax and try to return to the desired outcome.

3.The problem many people run into when it comes to losing weight, or any other goal, is that they get overwhelmed thinking about all the steps they have to take to achieve something. Your mind tends to put all of these steps together and you feel as if you have to do it all at once. This is not the case. You only have to live one moment at a time. This, in fact, is all you can do.

4. To lose weight, or achieve anything in life, you have to take certain actions. Or stop doing things that take you in the opposite direction, as the case may be. In most cases, however, it’s not more information that you need. You probably already know what you have to do and not do to lose weight. What’s stopping you is not lack of information, or even lack of will power. It’s the way you’ve been focusing on the wrong side of the equation. The more you focus on where you want to be, and not on the difficult (at least as you probably think of it) journey to get there, the faster you’ll arrive!

3 comments:

Amber said...

I have a really hard time keeping the goal in focus. I LOVE food & hate depriving myself. I am having a hard time getting started on eating healthier & exercising. Should I just start one or the other & then add the second one after I'm succeeding with the one? I really want to lose 40 lbs before I have another baby. We want to get pregnant again in about 12-18 months. I feel like that's not even close to enough time for me to lose that much weight. HELP ME!!! What should I do first?!

Cami's Healthy Living Blog said...

Amber, I would say don't focus too much on the END goal and focus more on losing like 10 lbs in 2 months. Small goals seem much more achievable and are easier to stick with. I still am not at my goal weight. It has been a battle for me just because my body is SO used to the healthy lifestyle that it is taking forever to lose it all! I lost about 75 lbs super fast a few years back and haven't been able to start it up again til just recently! Be patient with yourself. I say losing weight is 75% of what you eat and 25% exercise. Start with what you are eating first and then slowly add exercising.

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