Finding motivation

kay2190

Good evening. I've had a great week with my diet, and working out, yet I have been feeling rather depressed and lack of motivation. What are some thing that help you find your grove agian?

Lietchi

Honestly, motivation is variable at the best of times. Better to build a good routine you can depend on when motivation is lacking.

Also don't make your weight loss strategy so hard that you need a lot of motivation: avoid too restrictive diets (number of calories and the types of food you eat), exercise routines that you don't enjoy or aren't sustainable long-term (very high frequency difficult to combine with the other activities in your life,....).

yirara

Do you need to get motivated to brush your teeth in the morning?
Honestly, what Lietchi wrote above is true: Routine is important to make weightloss and sustainable maintenance something that is normal for you, not something that you need to find the motivation for.

EyeOTS

I remind myself why I started and how I gained the weight.

MargaretYakoda

Motivation is fickle. But I keep going.
Because (my reasons)
1) I’m not ready to rollover and give up on life yet.
2) If I don’t I definitely won’t get fit. If I don’t get as fit as I am able, doctors will continue to write me off as fat and lazy. Which is how I have been being treated by them for a long time now. And has created some very negative consequences.
3) The balance disorder I have had for years has robbed me of enough. I need my muscles. And I need to be thinner so I’m not working my muscles harder than needed.
4) Diabetics who don’t exercise and don’t eat healthy also don’t have long lives.
5) I paid too much money for my recumbent elliptical to become a coat rack.

PopGoesTheCoyote

Are you contending with depression itself? Because lack of motivation is a symptom of depression and depression can either be a problem in of itself, or a symptom of something else as well. Maybe instead of addressing the motivation issue, it might be more prudent to examine why you're depressed and what you can do about it.

AnnPT77

I agree with the "motivation is fleeting, seek sustainable habits" group above. Weight management, for anyone with a tendency toward overweight, is not a project with an end date. It's a forever thing, if that kind of person wants to stay at a healthy weight long term, I believe. The "project" part of it is experimenting, and finding:

* fun active things to do that increase fitness (and burn some calories) plus fit into one's overall life with good balance (enough time/energy for everything else that's important to a person),
* daily life habits that increase movement through the day (and burn some calories), and
* eating habits that involve consuming a sensible calorie level while getting reasonable overall nutrition, using foods the person finds tasty and filling, and that are affordable/practical to cook and eat.

The only thing that distinguishes weight loss (temporary) from weight maintenance (ideally permanent) is a moderate, manageable calorie deficit. Don't try to make loss fast (unless your health is so threatened by weight alone that speed is essential), instead look for ways to make it easy (relatively, anyway).

To answer your specific question: If I have motivation, it's independence and quality of life. I've been obese and inactive, obese and active, most recently healthy-weight and active.

The "healthy-weight and active" beats both of the other options big time for maximizing pleasure in my life (and I'm a hedonist). Calorie counting lets me balance immediate pleasure (eating/drinking all the yummy fun things) against overall long-term pleasure (feeling good, strong, healthy). I get to eat every delicious calorie I can, while keeping it at a level that keeps me on the good side of the health odds.

On top of that, I'm already 65 (60 when I reached a healthy weight, after decades of overweight/obesity). I can look around me and see that friends around my age (+/- 10 years or so for sure) on average have better quality lives if they've been active and maintained a reasonable body weight. They can do what they like (including fun things that involve lots of walking, stairs, etc.), eat/drink what they like, aren't sick very often, and recover faster when they do have illness or injury.

By contrast, friends who've stayed inactive, become significantly overweight, are limited in their activities. (They're lovely people, though, whom I value in my life!). They aren't able to do the fun things as much. (There's too much walking at art fairs, music festivals; too many stairs at stadium events; etc.). They need to have their children do more of their normal home-maintenance chores (or pay someone to do them). They can't eat/drink what they'd like, because of medical conditions, or the multiple medications they need to take for those health conditions. They need more surgeries, get sick more often, recover more slowly. Sometimes they even have chronic unpleasantness from drugs they need to stay alive, or from the combinations of drugs.

That contrast is pretty motivating, too, for me. I feel like I still have a chance at the better odds, for the better quality of life. I think for people who are younger, this can be pretty abstract or distant. But if a person looks around, I think it's also kind of obvious. YMMV.

I hope you find your groove: It's very worthwhile!