9 Ways To Get & Keep Your Motivation when on a diet!

Motivation Check: How To Get and Keep Your Motivation when on a weight-loss diet?

You will learn 9 ways in which you can easily get and keep your motivation during any diet.

If losing weight was easy, people wouldn’t invest so much time, money, and effort into making it happen. If anyone could lose weight any time, everyone would be their ideal weight and obesity would be a non-issue. Dropping weight takes hard work, self-discipline, and commitment.

However, it’s not always about the gruelling workouts and the diet and lifestyle changes. As effective as the CSN diet is, fat loss success is also about knowing when to flex and when to stand strong.

Here are some tips to help you get through those tough days when all you want is a cheeseburger, an extra large milkshake, and a nap.

It is Possible to Try Too Hard

Here’s a motivational analogy from clinical psychologist Joshua C. Klapow, Ph. D. to help you simplify your perspective: imagine your motivation is a car. In order to drive your car, you need some fuel in the tank.

You don’t need a full tank of gas either, just enough to get where you are going. In the same way, you don’t need to keep your motivation at maximum effort all the time either. “I tell people not to waste precious time and energy on staying highly motivated because motivation has a natural rhythm,” Klapow writes in his book Living SMART: 5 Essential Skills to Change Your Health Habits Forever. “Most people see a drop in motivation as a signal of failure, but it’s not.”

Klapow recommends that when an individual feels their motivation drop a bit, it’s time for a break. Get this, he actually states that most people benefit from breaks of one to three days.

Here’s Klapow again on why it works: “The problem with motivation is that the more people try to ‘catch’ it, the more elusive it becomes; by allowing it to run its natural course and at the same time having a set of habit-changing skills (such as a meal plan for the week), you’ll stay on track and your motivation levels will run their natural course.

If the tough gets going and you are feeling your motivation waning, don’t try to power through it. Take a break and come back at it fresh in a day or so. You’ll be glad you did.

Put Yourself To The Question

When you start to feel like your plan to lose weight fast is losing its momentum, it’s time to start asking yourself some simple questions. The most significant benefit to this technique is that it can be applied to just about any behavior you are trying to make into a consistent habit.

Here’s the list:

-If I quit now, how will I look in six months to a year from today?
-If I quit now, how will I feel in six months to a year from today?
-If I quit now, what will my health be like?
-If I quit now, how will this affect my friends and family?

Clean Out Your Wardrobe

Commitment is commitment, no matter what area of your life it impacts. If you are having a difficult time sticking to your commitment to yourself with a fat loss diet, try making good on other commitments at the same time.

Go through your wardrobe and donate clothes you don’t wear anymore. Pay off those debts you’ve been casually paying minimums on for a while. Keep promises to family, friends, and colleagues. .

When you struggle to keep one commitment, practice success with other commitments that are less difficult for you. As with any disciplined effort, practice makes perfect.

Avoid Unrealistic Body Images

Don’t put pictures of your ideal body type or super thin models as motivation.

Chasing those ideals often results in hurting your progress in the long term. A study was conducted in the Netherlands that divided women who wanted to drop excess weight into two categories: Group 1 was given a food journal with a photos of skinny models on the cover and on the pages inside, while the second group was given a journal with a neutral logo on the front cover.

The neutral group lost weight, while the group with the ideal beauty images on the front and inside actually gained weight. Researchers came to the conclusion that images of models actually discouraged most of the women in the picture journal group by focusing their attention on unrealistic self-image standards. Stop comparing yourself to a false reality, and instead inspire yourself to keep trying by posting images of yourself at your ideal weight.

You will find that your journey becomes significantly easier.

Stop Focusing on Looks, and Stay Focused on Feel

Your worth and attractiveness are not limited to a number on a scale or measuring tape. Stop that. To stay motivated, don’t focus on weight or looks, but instead linger on those feelings you have after an invigorating workout or a healthy meal.

Psychologist Simon Rego, Ph. D., who directs psychological training at the Montefiore Medical Center/Albert Einstein College of Medicine in New York, explains why this method is so effective: “If you focus on how you feel each time you exercise, you’ll get all the benefits of burning calories, plus the reinforcement of remembering how good it felt to do it, which should increase your motivation to do more.”

Make Fat Loss A “Business Plan”

No matter what goal or objective you are trying to achieve in life, you have to have a plan. As author and business expert Alan Lakein says, “Failing to plan is planning to fail.”

Write out your goals, set a deadline, and then develop a strategy from end to beginning for how you will achieve that goal month by month. Set realistic short term goals for losing weight (such as skipping unhealthy snacks or treats), and avoid ineffective methods like extreme cleanses or fasting to achieve those goals.

Achieving goals is worthy of some celebration, especially if they can take months or years to reach them. This puts you at risk of cutting yourself off at the knees in terms of motivation, so don’t wait to celebrate until you make it to the end game.

Plan in some little rewards along the way as you lost increments of weight, and for your halfway mark treat yourself to something really special that is non-food related such as a visit to a day spa or a vacation you have been wanting to take.

Incrementally renewing your motivation with rewards as you go makes you far less likely to quit in the long run since the interval between rewards is shorter.

Start Thinking Acting “As If”

Stop putting off those things you really want to do after you hit your weight loss diet goal. Go on that vacation and feel fabulous. Go visit that old friend you haven’t seen in a long time. Sign up for that dance class or yoga class.

What would you do if you were already at your goal weight? How would you feel physically? What would your days look like?

Acting “as if” means changing your mentality from penalizing yourself for not losing weight fast enough, and instead make your workouts and diet changes a source of empowerment to stay motivated.

Hang Up Your weight loss diet “Talisman” by Your Mirror

For some, this may mean your favorite pair of jeans that don’t fit anymore. For others, maybe it’s that bathing suit or outfit that you know will make you feel sexy and powerful.

This object serves as a talisman, or power symbol of sorts. Every time you look at it, you will remember why you are working on losing weight. That talisman allows you to draw power mentally and emotionally, and you can picture yourself and what your life will be like when you finally put those clothes on and they fit perfectly.

Bottom Line?

No single method for maintaining your motivation is guaranteed to work 100% of the time. That’s the beauty of having multiple techniques though: if one isn’t working out, try something else. So long as you don’t quit altogether, you will reach your fat loss goals in the long run.

Keep in mind that you are in control of your weight loss diet plan, and if you need to make adjustments and changes, you can do so at any time. You set the pace, you are the one to whom you are accountable.

Everyone struggles to get motivated and stay motivated sometimes. Don’t be too hard on yourself when you don’t feel like you are getting anywhere. Remember that the reality in your head is not the surrounding reality.

You can’t read people’s minds, and you’d be surprised how supportive people can be when you reach out for support and help in keeping yourself motivated. Above all, hang in there. You’ve got this. Stick to your CSN plan, replenish your motivation fuel regularly, and you will see that weight dropping away in no time.

Good luck!