Success Begets Success

When you talk to people about exercise and weight-loss you’re likely to get the reply “I’d love to do that but I just don’t have any motivation.” It’s true, motivation is the hardest thing to come by when you’re working to either lose weight or exercise more, so that really makes motivation the most important ingredient in a new life style. But, how do you get motivated? I wish there was an easy answer, some sort of formula that said ‘do this, than do that and viola, you’re motivated’, but it just doesn’t work that way. When I’m asked how I got motivated to lose weight I really can’t give a definite answer, I just did, however, after thinking about it all week I can tell you some things that have helped.

I don’t know about you but, when I’ve decide to lose weight and get healthy for the first week or two I’m all gun-ho! After a couple of weeks, however, not so much! Usually it’s because I miss eating sweets, or drinking soda etc. So this time I tried some simple tricks. First, with the HCG I have so little calories to take in each day that I really couldn’t cheat. I learned quickly not to do empty calories like soda. I found that flavored water (like Crystal light), made a great substitute for soda and without the calories. With the HCG I dropped the weight so fast that I felt the success right away and therefore was motivated to keep going. After all who would not feel motivated after losing 42 pound in 40 days! With a normal diet however, the success is not as immediate, so you have to be motivated to stay on it. Try finding little things to motivate you, like how long did you make it on the Elliptical when you first started? How long can you go now? Successes don’t need to be huge or grand to motivate you. Make competitions with yourself. For me, when I first got on the spin bike I thought that with having been working out for several months 20 minutes on the spin bike would be pretty simple. Yeah, not so much, I only made it 3 minutes before I thought I was going to die. So my new competition with myself was to work hard to get to 20 minutes on the bike. I can now do 30 minutes on that bike! Use little successes to stay motivated. Why? Because:

Success begets success!

Remember that motto, success begets success. Use your small successes to stay motivated to reach your big successes. For example: The first weeks of a diet you lose a lot of weight, then you start slowing down, when this happens most people get discouraged and start cheating on their diet thinking that because they didn’t lose the same five pounds this week, only one pound, well then they are failing, but they’re not. Why? Because they still lost one pound. Even if you only lost a single pound you’re one pound closer to your goal. I blame Biggest Loser for this attitude. Everyone is so disappointed when a contestant only loses one or two pounds, well of course they are. People on the Biggest Loser spend every day, all day, exercising and working on their diets! It’s only natural that with all that time they’re spending working on losing weight that they feel like a failure for losing only one pound. But people, be realistic, we don’t spend all day every day exercising and working on our diets. We have normal everyday lives to live. We have dinners to attend, business lunches, kids to get to events etc. Finding the time to exercise, planning our healthy meals, all of that is hard when your time is already stretched thin. My philosophy is that, if I’ve lost a pound I’ve been successful at losing weight....because I’ve lost a pound. As long as I don’t gain I haven’t failed. Many feel like they failed because they cheated, that is not true. So you ate a candy bar today, well fine, don’t do that tomorrow and you’re good. Cheating is not failing, GIVING UP IS FAILING. As long as you don’t give up you haven’t failed. Keep going and you’re succeeding.

Use each pound you lose as your motivation. Think to yourself, “I’ve lost three pounds this week, next week I’m going to lose another three pound.” Then work for that goal. Did you lose just that one pound, like I said that’s cool, but think about what you did to drop from your normal two or three pounds to that single pound. Maybe you had a couple of candy bars, or maybe your skipped a day of exercising, didn’t drink enough water. There is a reason you didn’t lose as much, find it and correct it. Did you do everything right? Well then maybe your body is getting use to the amount of exercise you’ve been doing, sucks I know, I just had to move from ½ hour a day cardio to a full hour (ICK), because my body adjusted to the amount I’ve been doing. You need to challenge your body, vary your exercise to get different results. For maximum results do at least an hour of cardio a day, and vary the cardio; running, rowing, spin bike, elliptical, stair stepper etc. Find several different kinds of cardio and mix it up. You’ll start losing again soon. Also, use that need to change as motivation too, your body is getting stronger, CONGRATS!!! You’ve accomplished the goal of getting healthier. That success can beget more success is losing weight.

One thing I did when I first started out was not to tell everyone that I was on a diet. I told my best friend and the lady I bought the HCG from. I didn’t even tell my husband that I was doing this. Why? Because once you’ve told people you’re dieting they start analyzing everything you put into your mouth. You’re already analyzing all of that, you don’t need others to analyze it for you. So keep it to yourself. People didn’t know I was dieting till I had already lost 60 pounds. Now at 85 pounds off everyone notices, even if they don’t know it’s your weight that is changing. I had one lady a couple of weeks ago that swore I had gotten a different haircut, when she finally said “Well something is different about you” I told her I had lost 85 pounds, her reaction was priceless, you know the whole jaw drop and bug eyes. HA HA!! It was great. That success of telling people how much I’ve lost motivates me to keep going. Once people learned I was working on losing weight, and they saw the success I’ve already had, their cheers, kind words and encouragement gave me the motivation to keep going. Now my motivation comes from them. I have become, as I said in my last post, a role model for others. That motivates me when I’ve been on the treadmill for 30 minutes and I’m dripping in sweat and my legs are burning and I just want to quit. I can keep going and moving for another 30 minutes because I don’t want to disappoint, I don’t want to discourage, so I keep going. Success begets success. I have 40 pounds left to go, but that is only a third of what I’ve already lost, so easy peasy as my son would say. I’ve done that, I can do it again.  I’ve been successful and that will help me to continue to succeed is this final push to get to the ultimate goal.

Success begets Success.