Fitbethlin's Journal

What motivates you?  I’ve been trying to figure out what my most-effective motivation tools are when I’m doing well.  These are what I’m going to call my top 5 tips.

1. Visualize! I felt like a dork/little kid/my normal self when I did this, but this time I put together a motivation collage.  I have a couple “unreal” people on there (That’s Jessica Alba in the bathing suit.  She’s too hot.), but I also focused on pictures of me and my DH at our happiest and healthiest.  I also added in my fake-after picture from weightview, which I think is an awesome positive motivation tool.  I used to post pictures of my fat pictures as sort of anti-motivation, but that just made me feel crappy.  Focus on the positive.  More than just this one collage though, I day dream about the things I will do as I get healthier – hanging on the beach, running with Marc, wowing people who haven’t seen me in a while.

( Go ahead and click on the image to see the big picture with all my captions.)

2. “Don’t try to live your life all at once. Slow down and enjoy it. – “friend” quoted by SparkPeople blogger Stepfanie Romine here”
Calm down! You don’t have to be perfect and start everything right now.  Just start walking the dog for 10 min every few days, or writing down your food.  Don’t try to do too much at once.  A little soreness is good – it means you had a strong workout.  So sore you are wolfing down advil like candy is stupid.  What you are about to experience is called “burnout.”  Gradually build up to being a fitness diva if that’s what you want, but going cold turkey and hard core only works on TV. (If I had the super awesome Bob Harper babysitting me through it, that would be different.  I don’t, mores the pity.)

3. Start each morning in such a way that, when your feet hit the floor, Satan says, “Oh sh*t! She’s awake!” ( I think I may be over-relying on my Quotes page, but that’s another thing that works for me.)  Start over everyday.  You may have been a hoss yesterday and gone for a run, lifted weights, done a 2 hour yoga session and eaten organic homecooked nutritional goodness, but today is a new day.  You could rock or you could suck.  The converse is true too.  Failure yesterday does not have to mean failure today.  This is part of why I weigh everyday – every morning, you face up to what happened, then you start new.   Um, also, this quote could also mean – eat breakfast & work out when you get up.

4. Do not do this by yourself. There is power in external accountability and in support from others.  You can find it in people you know, people you live with or people you meet online.  I love the blogging community and the weight loss forum community.  I love SparkPeople – there’s something great about the first time you get to help someone with a question that is just motivating.  And then there is the blogging community (check out the links to the right).  I don’t have the words to describe how cool it was the first time someone whose blog I read left me a comment!  I danced around the kitchen, just ask the husband.  And speaking of, his support this time is so so so helpful.

5. Set small goals and always reward yourself. I’ve listed weight loss goals on the right, and have set a reward for each.  I like that the goals are not freakishly difficult, but that I have to loose more each time to meet the next goal. My “non-scale related” goals are not overly quantified – which is a huge key for me.  I can get lost in the time it takes to calculate exactly how fast I ran, how far, how much my basal metabolic rate will change, etc.  And then I end up disheartened.  So I guess there is a corollary to this tip – Don’t quantify everything. My goals for this year (resolutions? goals? plans? whatever you call them) are to TRY three fitness activities (1) Tae Kwon Do (2) mountain biking and (3) rowing.  I don’t have any time frame that I have to do them for, just have to give each a fighting chance.  And I am being careful on my 5K training program not to figure out how far I’m running or how fast.  If I start to keep up with those numbers, I’ll get fixated and beat myself up when I can’t run a marathon at a 7min/mile pace.

~ by admin on January 8, 2009.