An MFP friend posted this on her newsfeed last week. It is spot on for motivation!



Lost Your Motivation? My Standard Answer.



Actually, you don’t need inspiration or motivation. You think you’ve “lost your motivation”. I assure you, you have not. Do you still want to be smaller, tighter, more defined and even muscular? Do you still want to avoid the complications of obesity? Heart disease? Stroke? Certain cancers? Painful joints? Limited mobility? Decreased social status (even though it seems unfair and we wish it weren’t so)? I assume the answers are “yes”. Then you are still motivated.

What has happened is that your emotional state changed. You are no longer excited about doing the work it takes to get there. Well, that was ALWAYS going to happen. Human beings are creatures of emotional change. We can no more maintain a constant state of “motivation” than we can be always happy or always angry or always sad. If a person has unchanging emotional states, that is actually criteria for a diagnosis of mental illness. What you need is to use your self-discipline.Now, the good news is, you already have the discipline you need, you just haven’t applied it to this project yet.

You have a job, correct? Do you show up, every day (or at least the vast majority of days) you’re scheduled unless you have a legitimate reason to miss? Or do you go on the days you’re excited and just not bother to show up if you don’t feel “inspired”?

Do you do your assignments at work whether they’re personally interesting to you or not? Or do you only do the stuff you feel like doing and lie or hide evidence about the stuff you didn’t bother doing because it didn’t interest you?

How about paying your bills? Do you pay the ones you are motivated to pay and blow the rest of your money on booze, drugs, video games and other frivolous stuff? Or do you, like most of us, pay your bills because you like eating and sleeping indoors? If you can manage these things, then congratulations, you have self-discipline.

Your weight loss project is the same kind of thing. You can’t just do it when you feel like it and then blow it off the rest of the time. You need to do it, consistently, most of the time or it will not succeed. You need to do the mental work necessary to move “taking care of my body appropriately” into the same mental category you have for all these other grown-up activities, that is “stuff I have to do whether I’m in the mood for it or not, or the consequences will be more unpleasant than I wish to bear”. The tool you need to use is habits.

Figure out your diet, what worked for you in the past or what you want to do now. Unless it’s something obviously crazy, like eating 600 calories a day, they all have various strengths and weaknesses and human beings are adaptable enough that we can thrive on different approaches. Then make a commitment to stick to that, every day, no cheats, no exceptions for at least six weeks, preferably 12.

Make it easy for yourself to eat according to your plan. Perhaps you need to use a menu and a shopping list. Perhaps you need to get bad foods out of your house or at least segregate your food into a separate cabinet. Perhaps you need to cook ahead. Whatever works for your specific situation, make that happen.

Make it hard for yourself to break your diet. Don’t buy things that are triggers for you. If you are a fast food junkie, avoid the triggering restaurants, even if it means changing your commute for the time being. Whatever your specific danger zones are, make changes to avoid them.

Figure out what activity you want to do, the one that makes you feel energized and alive. Then set aside time to do that. Make that time your sacred time, your investment in yourself. Don’t just randomly try to fit stuff in whenever you “have time for it”.

It is much easier to kick yourself out the door at 5:30 pm on Wednesday to go bike riding if you ALWAYS go bike riding at 5:30 pm on a Wednesday. This is the only body you get. Taking care of it is more important than wasting your time on web browsing or watching reruns on Netflix. Do this consistently too, for the same amount of time as the diet.

It will be hard, especially if you don’t have “motivation” to help you. Some days you will just be out there in a horrible mood, wondering why you ever started this and just going through the motions. So what? Your body will still burn calories either way. But at the end, you will have habits that support your healthy lifestyle. Sticking to it will be easier then.

And guess what? Motivation doesn’t just go away and stay gone forever. It comes back. You will get little bursts of motivation with every new success. Every inch lost. Every pound lost. Every pound more you can lift. Every extra pushup you can do. Every minute shaved off your personal best run time. Every kilometer further you can run. All of these will excite and “motivate” you like no photoshopped slogan on pinterest ever.

tl;dr Just do it.