Weight Loss Motivations: What Works?

When you’re on a diet – or working towards any big goal – one word that crops up a lot is “motivation”. If you’re trying to lose weight, something must have motivated you to do so: it might have been a particularly awful photo, a casual comment from a friend, a relative successfully losing weight, or the knowledge that a birthday milestone is coming up.

Some motivations are likely to keep you focused, on track and reasonably happy throughout your diet. Others will quickly discourage you, make you feel bad about your self, and may even sabotage your best efforts. So, what works?

1. Have A “Big Day” As A Target

One motivation that does work for a lot of dieters is to pick a particular event as a target – not just a date which has no other meaning attached. Focusing on looking great and feeling at your best for your fortieth birthday, your wedding or your foreign holiday can give you access to reserves of self-discipline and motivation that you never knew you had.

As Emma, who lost two and a half pounds, put it when explaining why she was confident she could break the yo-yo dieting habits of a lifetime and actually lose weight successfully:

I want to get married to my lovely, understanding, and infinitely patient fiancé in May and be proud to be the centre of attention with him, to accept the compliments without negating them, to have my wedding pictures taken and to cherish the memories of a happy day – not look back on it with regrets.

Is there a particular event coming up that could be your “big day” target? Make it far enough in the future for it to be a realistic goal (allow for losing an average of 1lb/week), and don’t try to crash-diet for something in a month’s time.

If you don’t have any big birthdays or family events coming up, how about making Christmas 2009 your “big day”? At an average of 1lb/week, you’d lose 42lbs by then – enough for relatives who’ve not seen you all year to really notice the difference!

2. Make Changes For Health Reasons

One motivation for many dieters is, sadly, a doctor’s warning that weight loss really is necessary. If you’ve been suffering health problems due to your size, then a health wake up call can flick that switch in your head from not-really-bothering about your diet to sticking-to-it-rigidly.

If you’ve had a wake up call like this, don’t try to ignore it. However busy you are with work or other committments, your health really does need to come first. It’s much better to take preventative action now than to wait for a health crisis (that might see you hospitalised or undergoing treatment for months).

And if you think you’re pretty healthy, despite your poor eating/exercising habits, you might want to reconsider. Scientists have recently found that the chance of having a stroke is more than doubled in otherwise healthy individuals who smoke, drink more than fourteen units (about seven beers) a week, don’t eat their five a day and aren’t active enough: you can find out more from the BBC website.

3. Feel Empowered By Your Weight Loss Journey

By this, I mean that many dieters find strong motivation in their feelings of success and determination that go along with losing weight. You can approach dieting as a long, hard, miserable slog … and you’ll probably struggle on for a few weeks, then give up. Alternatively, you can see dieting as a journey or even an adventure, an exciting new departure from how your life’s been up till now.

A great example of someone who found success this way is Shauna Reid, known to many of the online community as Diet Girl. She started her blog, called “The Amazing Adventures of Dietgirl” back in 2001, and since then, she’s lost half her body weight – and moved from Australia to Scotland, got married, and had her book published around the world. I’m sure that back in 2001, Shauna would never have guessed where dieting would take her.

How about you? What dreams have you been putting off because of your weight? What would you love to achieve, see, or do while you’re on your weight loss journey?

Written by Ali Hale

Related posts:

1. Weight Loss Motivations: What Doesn’t Work?
2. Tips For Maintaining Your Weight Loss (Part One)
3. Setting Yourself Up for Dieting Success