“Habit is habit and not to be flung out of the window by any man, but coaxed downstairs a step at a time.”  This quote by Mark Twain may not seem to have anything to do with losing weight on its face.  However, as you progress in your weight loss program, you may find wisdom in it.

Maintaining proper motivation to continue a weight loss program can be one of the biggest hurdles when trying to lose weight.  There are, however, some tricks you can use to stay motivated.

The motivational trick that many people report working best for them is looking down at the scale and seeing actual progress.  If you are able to get off to a good start, losing those first 5 pounds can turn into a dramatic motivator.  Once you see that your program is working and it is actually possible for you to lose weight, you will be encouraged to stay with it, and the weight loss will continue. Read the rest of this entry »

Looking to make a change and lose some weight? I have reviewed the top diet on the internet and you can go and read over 200 comments people have made about why this diet has worked well for them, as well as some of the problems.

Well if you have made it this far then I hope that these articles have done their job.

Over the last few days we have looked at many tools that will help you on your way to building a better life for yourself. All of these articles should have taught you something that will build motivation.

We have looked at how small changes in your life are the key to building your confidence and to at the same time the small changes are key to changing the bigger problems in your life. Setting goals and the importance of having goals gives us a vision of our future and the excitement of that future will help to make you want to move forward.

We have looked at creating habits and especially the habit of exercising first thing in the morning. Getting that morning exercise is going to give you an early success in the day and stop your from having the busyness of your life get in the way of the all important working out that you need to do.

Finally we now have priorities. These priorities are going to help you move forward.

So now we reach the end of this week long article series. I hope that you have seen the point and if not you can go back and reread any or all of the articles. The key to motivation is to have a burning desire, a great reason in your own soul to move forward.

Tomorrow, or next week, or next month you will probably run into some struggles, we all do. The most important thing that you can do to get on track is to use all of the tools that we have discussed this week. You need to look at your priorities, set the ones that will move you forward and drop the rest. You need to remember the reasons for these priorities. And finally you need to take the next steps that will get you closer to reaching new and exciting goals that you want badly enough to sacrifice for.

OK, we are nearing the end of motivation week and I just want to quickly write about rewarding yourself.

No matter how hard we work and what kind of success we feel it is important to reward ourself as a pause and a recognition to ourselves that we have done the right thing and have been successful.

When you reward yourself it doesn’t unnecessarily mean that you indulge but more so pamper yourself. Some people like the idea of a pizza or ice cream to celebrate a weight loss goal and I think that this is great. If you are on a diet that last thing that you want to do is sacrifice everything that you want in order to lose weight and later be angry that you are missing out on something.

Another way besides food for celebrating success is buying clothes or going to a movie or splurging for a massage. For women often a good celebration reward may be a facial or a pedicure (still don’t understand the pedicure thing but my wife sure likes them). There is no reason to limit yourself at all. About.com has a few more ideas for rewards for reaching your goals Read the rest of this entry »

One of the problems that you may having right now in getting started or moving forward in your fitness and health goals is the fact that you may have no confidence.

Confidence is something that is built only from the inside. We have all met people that are very confident and many people that have no confidence. Often I find that there is no reason for people in either group.

The best way to build confidence is to simply achieve simple goals and build upon them. When I say that you need to achieve a goal I don’t mean that you need to win an Olympic medal or anything, all you need to do is set a tiny goal, achieve it and move on. The first time years ago that I road my bicycle to work was a juge leap of faith at the time, I had not ridden a bike in years. After I rode to work and home that first time I knew that I could do it again, I learned that dressing and packing differently would make it easier and I was confident that I now had a new skill.

This is all that you need to build confidence. There is no secret to building confidence although everyone thinks that there is. People spend years and lots of dollars trying to find the secret to great self confidence when all it really takes to be confident is to build little goals, achieve them and move on to slightly bigger goals. Read the rest of this entry »

This book to the left is important. You will know that by then end of this post. One of the big things related to planning your day and getting motivated to do things is getting rid of all of those distractions in your head. On a daily basis we apparently think about the same 98% of things that we thought about the day before.

We are living distracted and the worst thing about it is that we are always finding more and more things on the internet to distract us from our goals instead of of simplifying our lives.

I fall into this distraction trap as badly as anyone. I am looking for a new digital camera and must have spent 20 hours researching forums, websites, reviews on Amazon and more. Guess what, earlier this month I was looking for a new pair of headphones to listen to movies with and went through the same process. I spent 10 hours deciding what headphones to buy and in the end I spent $23 on ebay for a pair of headphones. All this work is not at all worth the time that we spend.

The main help for many of our distractions is lists. David Allen of Getting Things Done fame says that your mind will not let go of distractions and ideas and thoughts until you put them somewhere that your mind will trust. One thing that I do in some parts of my life is to have lists. For this and other blogs I will have a list of post ideas and for around the house I do the same. Some parts of my mind are not always clear though. I do not have all the processes in place. Read the rest of this entry »

Have you ever noticed how life just kind of runs you over unless you take control of the day when you get up? There are two ways that a day will go if you just let it, either you will just do busywork and at the end of the day not feel like you accomplished anything, or you will jump from one burning crisis to another throughout your day and end it exhausted.

This would not haappen if you planned your day before bed the night before or at the kitchen table in the morning.

Planning your day can be as simple as making a list of the 5 or 10 things that you want to get done today, things that you do not want to have on that list tomorrow. Some people have taken this to an art form and will actually plan their week on Sunday night prioritizing what has to happen when.

The above plan of just sitting and creating a todo list is great if you are not getting anything done. If you do not have a plan for the day other people will make their tasks your plan for your day and this is not good. If on the other hand you are fighting with issues that are coming up day after day then you are probably stuck in that endless loop of refixing problems that were not resolved correctly before. Read the rest of this entry »

Experts say that it takes 21 days to create a habit. I do not even know if this is true but the one thing that I do know is that if you do something, anything for 21 days it becomes ingrained inside you.

Let’s take that idea and run with it here shall we? Today we are as we are, if I decide that I am going to become more positive (this would make my wife and coworkers crazy) then I would think in my head as much as I could all day everyday about my successes in the past and the things that are going well. This would change me from being pretty positive to excited as I would feel that there is nothing that I can not do.

At the same time if someone wanted to become healthy and they started to jog everyday as a runner would they would be sore the second day, sore the third day, stronger the fourth day, and very powerful by the fifth day. The habit is being formed, by the 21st day this person would be areal runner putting in mile after mile a week. Often runners have trouble taking days off even when they know they have to because that cadence of exercise reminds them of who they are, the habit has already been formed.

If you wanted to lose weight this 21 days to a habit is even a shorter time but it works the same way. If you decide to eat only fruit instead of candy then you struggle for about three days and then it is over and three weeks later you have some chocolate and it starts burning in your stomach and the sugar rush gives you a headache, the habit was formed already.

Years ago when I quit smoking I just imagined myself as a non smoker and then I just quit, I had been unsuccessful at cutting back so I decided that cold turkey was my best chance. After a couple of days fo struggles I was OK and I continued my working out then one day weeks later I realized that the habit was now that I looked at myself as being in good shape and that I was flushing those bad toxins of smoking, I had turned the corner.

Short and long term goals are a very important thing to have in your arsenal to fight against motivation problems.

When you make goals it is easy enough to say

“I want to lose 100 pounds in a year”

or

“I want to run a 10k next May”

But the trouble is that if all of your goals are just long term goals then you will have nothing pushing you to that workout today. Conversely if you have only short term goals then you just see the trees and not the forest. If you shoot to just lose three pounds a week then you will not know why you are doing it, no big picture and the 3 pounds will turn to a two pound loss and then a one pound loss and then you will say “Stick it, I have better things to do then try to lose one pound”.

So make sure that you have goals in all parts of your life, make sure that in fitness, health, family, spiritual, and money that you have goals for next week, next month, 6 months from now and a year from now. I have written an extensive goals setting post a while back that you can look at to get more ideas. Read the rest of this entry »

It is really important to surround yourself with success. As excited as we get in life it is always a struggle at some points. I know that when I am riding my bike in July it is like a dream but in December, not so much. So make sure that you have support all over the place.

So how do you support yourself with success? Mostly from reading and seeing stories about other people that have done what you want to do. If you want to lose weight then go to Amazon and don’t look for the newest hottest diet book but instead look for books and stories about people that have lost weight. You know that these people didn’t just lose weight easily, they had setbacks just like you will have and they will have written about how they coped with these setbacks.

Your friends are also a great inspiration to help you get stronger and improve your confidence. Have you figured out yet that this post is all about confidence being the key to success. Choose your friends and coworkers that you hang out with carefully. Make sure that everyone around you is going to nourish your confidence and be very ready and eager to receive praise from people about your changes and your success

One of the big reasons that I am such a fan of the Biggest Loser TV show is not just to see competition, or fitness tips, or diet tips. The biggest reason I watch the Biggest Loser is to watch success stories in action. See the elation as someone gets one step closer to their goal, see the tears as someone has a bad week or feels their dream slipping away. All of the people on the Biggest Loser TV show win in the end but the struggle is always there and it is incredibly motivating. Read the rest of this entry »

One of the biggest secrets to people that achieve a lot in life is that they get the most important things done first thing in the morning before anyone has even got their first cup of coffee in them. The success happens before or just around dawn and then these world beaters move through their day as anyone else does.

If you want to get healthy by doing cardio or doing weights then the best time to do these things is before you even get going in the morning. I remember listening to Tony Robbins on a tape once say that if you want to lose weight then leave your running shoes beside oyur bed so your just roll out of bed and into them before you even get a chance to say no to the workout.

When you try to workout in the morning you will find that the tired resistance only lasts a few minutes, after you have walked for 1 minutes or ridden your exercise bike for 3 minutes you will be into it and rejoicing at the fact that you are doing something great for you that very few people ever do and that is to be successful. What a great way to start the day with a success to build on before you have even had breakfast.

After you have done your morning workout once then the habit will be starting to form, you will confident that you can do it again. Read the rest of this entry »