Lack motivation in diet

satisatisati

Hi I do my workouts daily but I lack motivation to diet. So I look *kitten* even though I workout regularly.

What keeps you motivated to stick to your diet?

Lietchi

What does 'dieting' mean to you?
To lose weight, you just need to keep your calories in check. It doesn't require banning favorite foods or any other drastic unpleasant changes to food intake.

My suggestions:
- don't aim for an overly aggressive rate of loss, losing weight slowly means less hunger
- don't change what you eat unless you can eat like that for the rest of your life

I lost 75lbs eating all of my favorite foods, I just changed the proportions and quantities and made some substitutions after realizing how calorie dense some foods are.
I didn't need 'motivation', I just needed consistency in sticking with my calorie goal which was mostly a matter of habit (easy on most days since I was only aiming for a small calorie deficit).

AnnPT77

I agree with lietchi: Doing some whacky, difficult named diet is 100% optional.

I just started logging what I ate, and reviewing my food diary. I could notice foods that "cost" more calories than that food felt worth to me, in terms of tastiness, nutrition, filling-ness, convenience, or general happiness. I could reduce or eliminate those foods, and eat fewer calories, still be pretty contented. Sometimes I'd cut a high-calorie/low-value-to-me food, and replace it with some other food I enjoy that better helped me meet my goals. That part was like figuring out better ways to spend my calorie budget. By chipping away at process gradually, I found new eating habits that got me in a good balance of calories, nutrition, etc.

Because I stuck with foods I enjoy eating, it didn't feel miserable or punitive, and with practice the new eating patterns became quite habitual, i.e., they could keep going almost on autopilot when life got complicated (as it will). I'm now in year 6+ of maintaining a healthy weight, after about 30 previous years of overweight/obesity. If I needed to be motivated and exercising willpower every minute, I'd never have reached a healthy weight, let alone stayed there. Motivation is a strictly limited resources. Habits that are happy (or at least tolerable) almost sustain themselves, no motivation required.

IMO, life is too short to eat in a way that makes me miserable, even if it's temporary . . . and if a person wants to stay at a healthy weight long term, it can't be temporary. Weight management - for someone like me with a tendency to be overweight/obese - is not a quick project with an end date, after which things "go back to normal". That's the recipe for cycles of yo-yo dieting, something that can be even more unhealthy than just staying kind of fat.

P.S. I worked out most days of the week for the last dozen or so years I was overweight/obese. I was training hard, even competing as an athlete, but stayed fat. Honestly, even though losing weight wasn't easy psychologically every single minute, it was much simpler logistically than I'd ever imagined . . . and a much bigger quality of life improvement than I'd imagined, too. I could kick myself for not figuring this out decades earlier.