How can I keep myself motivated?

mbrown42989

AnnPT77

Dunno about you, but I don't have a big enough motivation budget to carry me through the weeks/months it took to lose a meaningful total amount of weight - around 50 pounds in just under a year, in my case.

My preferred solution was to pick the easiest possible plan that would gradually take me to goal weight, then keep me there long term, ideally permanently. I'm in year 9+ of maintaining a healthy weight after around 30 years pre-loss being overweight/obese, so that's worked out OK for me.

Maybe this doesn't apply to you, but a lot of people seem to arrive here with a plan to cut calories to the barest minimum for aggressively fast weight loss, give up all their favorite foods or treat foods, eat only superfoods, implement a bunch of restrictive rules around eating, maybe follow a trendy named diet . . . then plan to stack a punitively intense, miserable daily exercise plan on top of that.

That takes a lot of motivation. It also doesn't usually end well, but typically ends quickly. It's just too hard.

I'm a fan of figuring out how to stay mostly full and happy eating foods I enjoy that add up to sensible calories a bit below weight-maintenance calories, and that ideally deliver reasonable overall nutrition. I also like finding fun - or at least tolerable/practical - ways of moving more. That might be exercise, but it might also be more daily life movement. Any increased movement helps. A non-fatiguing approach can actually be more productive for weight loss, because we don't drag through our days doing less, resting/sleeping more, and burning fewer calories than expected that way.

What an easier plan looks like is pretty individual, but it's a thing we can figure out by trying things, keeping what works, crossing what doesn't work off the list. Along the way, possibly some oopsie eating will occur, but that's OK as long as we treat that as a learning experience, tweak our plan to be more realistic, and keep going.

The less "motivation" a plan takes - or willpower, discipline, etc. - the higher my odds of success, I figure. It won't be easy every single second, because habit changes can be a challenge. But it doesn't need to be miserable, let alone impossible.

Best wishes!

ETA P.S. It doesn't hurt to take a break at maintenance calorie for a week or two after a couple or three months in a calorie deficit, too. There are physiological reasons and psychological reasons why that might help.