How To Keep Your Fitness And Weight Loss Motivation

Many workout, fitness and weight loss resolutions fail because of two crucial mistakes people make that sooner than later kill their motivation. Here is how to avoid them and keep going.

New Year’s Resolutions

Those resolutions are still being made, trust me. Because every year, during the first few days of January, I have them coming in: loads and loads of hits on my home workout plan for beginners and all those articles on weight loss.

Two to three weeks later things have tapered down again to normal and those noble goals of getting healthier and fitter are probably already forgotten.

Why does that happen? I reckon it’s because people want to change, but make two big mistakes when trying to put things into practice:

Keep Yourself Motivated

As I said in the video,  I myself am the best example for this. When I was 196 lbs and wanted to lose weight, I looked up what was considered a healthy body weight for someone my size and decided that my “big” goal was reducing myself by 33 lbs.

But given that I could lose 2 lbs / week maximum without endangering my health, I was also looking forward to four months of counting calories and being strict about what I ate. Four months without being able to say “I did it” – how encouraging.

So I set my first milestone at going below 190 lbs, then 185, 180 etc., which meant that about every week I got to put down a “mission accomplished” mark on my list. Of course, at the end of that list still was the final the 163 lbs, but seeing the list of subgoals I had already left behind growing longer and longer was what kept me motivated.

Be Reasonable

All that being said and done, your goals of course should be reasonable. Trying to lose 20 lbs of weight per month is not very realistic. If you are untrained, expecting to be able to run a marathon within three months is setting yourself up for disappointment. Make your goals a bit ambitious, but doable.

For weightlifting, this article should give you an idea what can be expected in what time frame, this article shows you how to find the right intensity for cardio activities and this article explains how weight loss works and what loss should be aimed for in what time frame.

Picture courtesy of “jayneandd“.