Serial Starter - This Time for Sure

Well done on making the decision to get started! I hope this app gives you motivation, remmember to start small and don't set your goals too big that it feels like a struggle everyday. Slow and steady 🐾

Welcome aboard!

Just remember, Motivation is great to get you started but it's flash in the pan and will soon fade. You have to find your "why", have patience and understand that one bad day or even three bad days isn't a failure....it's a long term goal.

Serial starter 😂😂 that's me too. I'm back trying again, keeping my goal small hopefully I'll stick to them this year 😁

Haha! Your post perfectly describes my morning today! Serial starter for sure, and the number I saw this morning was a bit deflating. Hoping to stick to it this time! Good luck to you!

I used to call myself a serial starter too, which was just a nicer way of calling myself a serial quitter.

I then realised that the only reason I was a serial starter/quitter was that I kept trying to do things in a way that weren't right for me and just to bullishly push through via shear will power. Then I realised that 'will power' and 'motivation' are very limited and finite resources and can only be relied on short term, that in short order that will power and motivation will dry up and I'd quit, my reserves of will power and motivation would build back up and I'd start again. Rinse, repeat, decade after decade.

So this time I decided that I had to find a way to manage my weight that was more or less 'effortless'. That didn't require me to struggle or use those temporary reserves of will power to 'push through'. So that's what I did. I threw out everything I though I knew and went back to a couple of VERY simple rules.

1. Keep it simple rule. Lose all the nonsense and complications. Weight management is a very simple energy equation so there's no need to make it more complicated. All I needed to do was to eat fewer calories than I used most of the time. So that's it. I track my calories and more often than not eat fewer calories than I use. Simple. What, when, how or why I eat doesn't matter. It's maths, pure and simple.
2. The 'forever' rule. When I make a change I ask myself the question. "Can you do this forever without really trying, without needing motivation or will power?" and if the answer is "No" then I don't make that change. I'll sometimes discard it entirely and go looking for something else I can do but 90% of the time I'll rework the change to be something that does meet my forever rule.

Since all the changes and approaches I make are simple and uncomplicated (Rule 1) and none of the changes or approaches I have adopted require any great effort to maintain forever (Rule 2) I've found that the start/stop/start cycle has ceased.