Get Motivated

Motivation comes from within. If you are not ready to lose weight, you won’t. You’ll just come up with a lot of excuses for why you’re not being successful. If you don’t want to get in shape, you won’t. You’ll come up with lots of reasons not to exercise. Here are some of my favorite excuses, along with my rejoinders:

• We don’t have any healthy food in the house. Go shopping! And throw out the bad stuff!
• I don’t have any willpower. Is there an invisible force opening your mouth and forcing the food in? Seriously, make sure that the foods that cause you the most difficulty are not in your house. These are called trigger foods because they trigger eating binges in you. Get rid of them!
• It’s too cold outside to exercise (or too hot, or raining, etc.). Exercise inside, or exercise at a different time of the day.
• My bicycle is broken.Walk, run, swim, or do something else. Just get active!
• I’m bored with using the treadmill. Join an exercise class and do something different.
• Nobody wants to exercise with me. Sometimes you have to do things by yourself.
• It’s okay; it’s a special occasion. This is okay, but only if you don’t have a special occasion every day or week. Same thing for making exceptions. Try to limit these to one per month.
• It’s hot outside; I’m going to get some ice cream. That’s okay too, as long as you work those calories into the rest of the day.
• I can’t afford a gym membership. Go outside, walk in the park, on a walking trail, or in an arboretum or a mall, or run on the track at your local high school.

You have to want to lose weight or it just won’t work. If you find yourself making excuses, maybe you just aren’t ready. You need something to inspire you. The fact that you’ve picked up this book is a good sign, but it’s not necessarily going to mean that you are ready to go on a lifechanging diet program that results in you being more fit than you’ve ever been before. You need perseverance and determination for this. You also need support. You need someone to tell you that it’s okay that you overate yesterday. Everyone falls off the wagon once in a while. You need someone to motivate you because they are losing weight and you’re not. You need someone who has done it and can tell you which pitfalls to watch out for. Dieting and losing weight is hard work. You simply cannot do it all alone.

You can get support offline at Weight Watchers meetings or from your friends, family, and coworkers. You can also get support online through a number of sources, including Weight Watchers, SportBrain, SparkPeople, and many other sites. I will cover support sites and the different types of support you can get online. To diet with the help of your computer, you can join Weight Watchers online for support and their eTools food diary software, keep a careful diary of what you eat, and work out judiciously, tracking your progress with a SportBrain Web-enabled pedometer.