MOTIVATION!!!....Free to a good home! :)

This is probably going to be a long one, so go get yourself a pint of water and get comfy!! lol

If I can help one person out on here by posting this then all the typing will have been worth it!

I want to share with you peeps a few theories, opinions and ideas I have been using to help me get closer to where I want to be.

I see a lot of posts and MFP friends getting down about "progress". They aren't noticing a difference with themselves or the scale has shown a loss of 0.4lbs for a weeks worth of hard work. I can totally understand why this can upset people so if you are ever feeling that way then here is an analogy that may help:

Imagine your body is a jacuzzi (or an Olympic swimming pool in my case! haha) which you use every morning. If during the night someone came took a small bucket of water out of the jacuzzi you would never be able to tell the next morning! gradually though, as the buckets mount up you start to notice that maybe the jacuzzi is getting shallower! The important part is, however little the change is, the jacuzzi is gradually being emptied.

It isn't going to happen overnight and everyone reacts to weight loss in different ways so just because Mrs X has lost an inch off her waist after only 7 days, doesn't mean you will but it WILL happen!

There are no short-cuts to any place worth going, and your "Jacuzzi" will over time become a puddle in the bottom of a tank!

Mini Goals!! now I love these, there is nothing better than seeing that you are on track is there??? However you can set yourself up for failure or disappointment if you do not set the right mini goals! Most business folk on here will have come across a KPI of some sort, or even use them! A Key Performance Indicator (or index), businesses use these to track the performance of a product or department and I use them to track my weight loss!!

In my opinion there are safety in numbers, so the more mini goals the better However as a lot of us are here for the long haul making a basic goal of "I want to lose 2lbs a week" isn't the best idea. One of my own personal mini goal is to "lose on average 3lbs per week for the next 3 months"

I see a lot of people who will lose 4lbs...YAY!! and then 0.5lbs the next week :-(.....that is nothing to get upset about!!!! That is an average of 2.25lbs over the last two weeks! that's fantastic!! So you lose 4 - 0.5 - 1 - 3 - 2 over 5 weeks, that is an average of 2.1lbs a week! now doesn't that sound a lot better??

Try not to play emotional roulette with the scales too, your weight goes up and down all day! so if you are a scale addict then try weigh yourself at the same time once a day, I prefer once a week but we are all different

Back to the KPI's, the scale is one of them but don't just relay on it, measure everywhere!, if you scales measure body fat then do that (its not 100% accurate but as long as its going down ). Get a shirt, dress, t-shirt that doesn't fit, try it on every week and make sure you TELL EVERYONE when it does!

Most of off all though, believe in yourself...you CAN and WILL do it, you are going to have bad days, great days and average days, its not going to be easy and you will probably hate parts of it but that doesn't mean it isn't possible!!!

Doing anything is 100% more effective then doing nothing

IMPORTANT!!! - Please understand these are MY opinions and just that, nothing else. I in no way want to come across as telling you what you should do, that bit is down to you. But like I said if one person can take a little bit of what I have said and it helps them then great

If nothing else you have just had a Pint of water anyway!! :laugh: haha

Ben.