It happens to all of us. You start off strong, you’re pumped, motivation is high and after a couple weeks that motivation seems to have disappeared. This usually happens when you are so close to establishing a routine and seeing results. Whatever you do, don’t you dare give up!
Ok, so you’ve kick started your fitness journey and you’ve been on fire for it…until now. That motivation you had at the beginning seems to have moved on without you and now you’re struggling to keep yourself going. I feel like this is one of those things nobody really tells you, but the truth is, motivation is fleeting. And, I hate to burst your bubble even more, but motivation is not there most of the time. The sooner you can come to terms with this the better, because you can shift your mental energy toward discipline and determination. This is why it’s so important to lay a good foundation for yourself at the beginning.
I have been dieting and exercising for well over 20 years. That said, I’ve had more than my share of times where I’ve fallen off the proverbial wagon with this. Motivation fades, life happens, you let enough time pass and the next thing you know it’s been months and now you have to start all over. Having been through this several times myself, I know motivation is short-lived and that most of the time you won’t feel like working out or tracking your food or eating on plan, so to speak. Over the years, I have found some things that help keep me going. These are:
- Forget motivation.
- Go back to your why.
- Go back to your goals.
- Focus on one change at a time.
- Clear the self-sabotage/fear/unworthiness.
Before I started exercise and dieting, which was at a pretty young age, I used to wish I could magically get the body I wanted. I used to cry and beat myself up and basically feel sorry for myself that I didn’t look like the other girls. It felt so unfair. Then one day, my mom said something that flipped a switch in my brain. She acknowledged my feelings and told me it was unfair and it sucks, and that I just had a different body than my sister, my cousins, and the other girls at school and I had to accept that. She told me if I wanted to change it, I was going to have to work at it. Now this was about a year after my dad had had a five-way bypass on his heart and had to be on a low fat, vegetarian diet; so, she said she would help me with diet and that I could use her exercise bike to get more exercise. That started my first venture into weight loss. Her acknowledgement of my frustration coupled with a path forward to reach my goal lit the fire and got me started.
I went low fat and started exercising every day. Keep in mind this was like 1994, and the emphasis was low-fat diets and lots of cardio. So, that’s what I did. I ate 7 grams of fat a day and did 45 minutes on my mom’s 1980s exercise bike every day after school, and I lost 40 pounds in 4 months. I can tell you even back then, after like a week I did not want any part of that anymore, but I wanted to lose weight more than I wanted to quit. Fast forward to when I was 19 and wanted to get the weight off again, similar situation, started strong, motivation waned, but I wanted to lose the weight more than I wanted to quit. Then, around 8 months in I hit a wall, stopped losing; but I didn’t want to go backwards. I’d come so far, gotten closer to my goal. So, I started researching more about weight loss, fitness, etc. and that’s when I discovered weightlifting.
Jumping forward another few years, made more progress with weightlifting but hit another plateau. I wanted to lose weight and reach my goal more than I wanted to quit. This is when I started learning about diet/calorie intake. Being young and inpatient at the time, I wanted results as fast as possible. Enter the low-carb diet. It was about 2002 at this point, so I’ll let you do the math on which low-carb diet was the rage at that time. I’ll just tell you it was miserable and motivation waned extremely fast, but I started to see results after the first couple of weeks and that kept me going. Every increment closer to my goal that I got helped me keep going.
After several years on a low-carb diet, coupled with a lot of gym time every day, I got burned out. I eventually decided I was going to shift to “normal” eating. My plan was to continue to eat healthy, but I was just going to add carbohydrates back into my diet. Little did I know what I was in for. Though I continued working out and eating reasonably healthy by most standards, I rapidly gained 35 pounds in about 3 months; keep in mind it took me 4 years to lose this much weight. Needless to say I was upset and lost my motivation for a while. I eventually got it back and basically continued to cycle through weigh loss, plateau, gain, weight loss, plateau, gain, over and over for years.
Looking back it wasn’t motivation that kept me going. It was determination; I was determined to get to my goal, no matter how long it took. I was determined to at the very least maintain the progress I had achieved as I continued to work toward my goal. In other words, I wasn’t going to go backwards. This is how I ended up trying every dang thing there was to try. But the frustration and agony of the process disappeared when I shifted my focus from losing weight or looking better to feeling better and being better. While this shift alleviated the frustration and agony, it didn’t mean I suddenly had an endless supply of motivation. I still have many days I simply do not want to get up and work out. I still have days that I don’t feel like tracking or I just want pizza instead of what I should be eating. Yet, here I am still showing up for myself every day and doing the best every day. So, how does one do this? How does one stay the course when the motivation is gone or after cycling through all these ups and downs? Well looking back on all I’ve learned, there are five practices and tips that have helped.
- Forget motivation.
First, you have to forget motivation all together. Nobody really tells you this, but motivation is temporary and the sooner you accept this, the better. You are not going to be motivated all the time. In fact, for the most part you won’t be motivated in that fired up, ‘let’s do this’ kind of way. I guarantee you, the people you see that are really fit and have been doing this for years are not motivated all the time. Motivation is always high when you decide you’re ready to start something and it disappears fast. Have you ever noticed the difference in crowds in a gym when you compare the first week of January to the second week of January?
This happens because we get comfortable in whatever our norm is. We like comfort. Change is hard, which is why we generally do not like change. However, change is only hard until it’s not, when you’ve gotten past that growth spurt and established a new norm. This is the difference between those folks you see who are super fit and have stayed that way for years and those who tend to start and stop over and over. The people who stay with it for years have established it as their way of life; it is part of their day, their routine. It takes time to do this and it requires the stamina to keep going after the motivation wanes, which I’m going to get into more in a bit.
We are excited at the beginning of something like a new weight loss endeavor, for example, because our readiness is high and we are ready to turn over the proverbial new leaf. There’s a sense of satisfaction with ourselves after that first successful day and this carries us through for a while, but then after several days, maybe a week, the motivation seems to have left the building. This is probably the most critical point, it’s your turning point, it’s where you must decide to keep going, even though the “fun” of it and initial motivation is gone. This is much easier, one, if you go into this knowing the motivation is going to wane, and two, having a deeper reason behind why you are doing this in the first place. This leads me to the second thing. - Go back to your why.
In an earlier post, How to Get Started on Your Whole Health Journey, I laid out a framework for getting started on a weight loss journey and the first step in that is to determine your why. I recommend going and checking this out if you haven’t. In a nutshell, your why is the reason you are embarking on this weight loss or health and fitness journey in the first place, but it is not just ‘I want to look good in my swimsuit this summer.’ It has to be deeper than that. It needs to be something that is going to keep you going. Yes, you may want to look good in your swimsuit, but there are much bigger reasons beyond aesthetics.
If you already have your why, then this is where the rubber meets the road. This is the stage that you start to really need to go back to it and rely on it. Remind yourself of all the reasons you are doing this. Remember who you want to be, how you want to feel. Remember the things you’re fed up with that put the fire under your butt to start in the first place. Nobody is going to add days to your life and nobody can do this for you. It is not easy, but it is absolutely worth it and it will get easier when you reach the point that you’ve established this as part of your routine. It takes about 21 days to establish new habits and, in my experience, it takes about another 21 days to reach a certain level of determination and commitment that will keep you going. - Go back to your goals.
You also want to go back to your goals. This is another thing I discussed in the earlier post noted above; goals and how to set them. One of the things I talk about there is setting both long term goals, such as your goal weight or physique as well as short or interim goals along the way. So, for example a goal for the first month, a three-month goal and so on. Just like your why, going back to the goals is another important way to keep yourself moving forward beyond that magical first week when you are all fired up with motivation. Similar to remembering why you are doing this, you want to remind yourself of what you want to accomplish for yourself and honor your commitments to yourself.
For example, when I talk about goal setting I also talk about picking a reward for yourself when you achieve it. It’s basic psychology – positive reinforcement. This also does a lot for you on a subconscious level, because you are sending a message to yourself that you do what you say you are going to do; you honor the commitments you make, including the ones you make to yourself.
Go back to your goals. You chose them because they are things you want for yourself. You can’t get them simply by wishing for them; you have to make them happen. You do this one day at a time, one step at a time and you remind yourself of your goals as many times as you need to to keep going. Where do you want to be in a year, in three months, in a month – I’m sure it is not in the same place you are now or at the start of your journey.
Another reason it is so important to have both long- and short-term goals is because it gives you checkpoints and reinforcers. When you hit that one-month goal, there’s a sense of excitement and you’ve proven to yourself you can do it. You celebrate the accomplishment by doing something to reward yourself, like those new shoes you’ve been eyeing, or a pedicure, or whatever. The more of these you hit and the more time that passes the greater your investment. This makes it harder to just throw in the towel when you have a bad day or week, because you have put so much effort in and you have already accomplished things you didn’t think you could. You’re not going to just toss that aside so easily, and if you do, you’re much more likely to pick yourself up and get back on track faster. - Focus on one change or behavior at a time.
Change is hard and we certainly don’t make it easier when we decide we’re going to change all the things, all at once. We all get into this mode on some level every New Year’s Day, right? All the stuff you realize you didn’t do or didn’t finish over the year floods into your mind like a tidal wave and then we tell ourselves, ‘not this year, this year I’m doing it all, I’m gonna to lose 50 pounds, I’m gonna eat perfect, I’m gonna work out twice a day, I’m gonna quit drinking, I’m not having any junk food or fast food…” you get the idea. Even if it’s not the New Year’s Day trap, we get into this trap every time we get ourselves fired up to lose weight or get healthy. We tell ourselves we’re going to change all these habits and behaviors in a few weeks and have a swimsuit model body at the end.
This isn’t all our fault. A lot of this gets in our head from the fitness industry. There are tons of these programs and diets out there promising your dream body in x amount of time. They almost all sell the same thing, a diet and an exercise routine. While what you eat and getting exercise are important it is very misleading at best and an outright lie at worst that you can put an amount of time and specific result on this for everyone. You can’t. Everyone is different and everyone is starting at a different place. The other glaring hole in all these fads and programs that lead us into this flawed way of thinking is they fail to address the root, which is behavior change.
We don’t wake up one day with an extra 20, 30, or 50 more pounds on us. Yes, it might feel that way, but the point is it took time to gain that weight. It happens progressively over time and eventually we reach a point of overwhelm about it, maybe feel to far gone. So it is not realistic to expect to lose all the weight in a month, even 3 months. Depending on where you are and a number of other factors it could take a year or more to get there. This is why it is so important to make incremental changes, over time. You can do this by focusing on a few small changes in food, exercise, and mindset for example, or you can focus on one change at a time, then add another one and so on.
The idea is to change your habits and behaviors gradually and incrementally. As you establish each new habit or behavior, then you take on another. For example, I find that for most people, the food/nutrition is really the most important for weight loss, and the more difficult to modify and sustain. Most people think it’s exercise, which is also a challenge, but the hardest part truly is controlling what you’re eating and drinking. So, this may be the first change you focus your energy on changing. I would recommend starting with this. It doesn’t mean you can’t also work on exercise, but if you get into overwhelm and find you’re feeling like ‘this is too much,’ then drop whatever else you’re trying to change, and focus on the food/nutrition, or if it’s exercise, same thing, don’t’ stress as much about the food.
Once you’ve gotten yourself to where you’ve established good habits with your food or exercise, whichever you’re focusing on, then you can start to work in the other. Again, making smaller, incremental changes. You can do this monthly, or every six weeks or so. Use when you feel solid in the new behavior as your indicator for when to start working on the next behavior, or maybe it’s challenging yourself a bit more, to keep progressing forward. The secret sauce is not to allow yourself to get comfortable. It is in the discomfort that we make progress and grow. - Go deeper and clear limiting beliefs or emotions holding you back (fear, guilt, resentment, etc.)
This last one really came into play for me much later into my journey. I’ve hit plateaus many times along my journey and as a result I have had cycles of gaining the same 5-10 pounds back, losing it again, gaining it back. As you can imagine this gets extremely discouraging and I’ve had many times when I’ve wanted to just give up, but I can’t. I’ve come too far. In the past year, as I’ve gone into deep inner healing, I started to learn this may be due to something beyond eating right, exercising, and all the mindset components. I learned about unhealed trauma and past hurts and the role these have played in keeping me stuck. It can take on various forms, such as self-sabotaging behaviors, but it can also be subconscious to where your body simply won’t let it go due to these underlying issues.
I’ve found there is something to this after I sought energetic healing for myself, after I’d done as much as I could on my own through self-healing. I’ve discussed this in depth in Seven Steps for Healing Emotional Triggers, if you are interested in exploring self-healing. After months and months of working through my own emotional triggers and self-healing work, I was still stuck. I’ve since learned it was related to things like fear and grief that was tied to past traumas and hurts. It wasn’t until I started working with an energy healer that I learned this, cleared it, and started to see changes. I have since gotten trained in this healing myself, so I can continue this for myself as well as help others with it.
This is a very in-depth and broad topic, so it is too much to get into here. I did a recent master class on this and will be offering it again soon, so keep an eye on my social media pages for that. I mention this here because you may run into something similar along your own journey. You may be doing all the things and you may achieve great results to a point and then get stuck. This is really frustrating, and it can certainly take the steam out of your engine. So, if you find yourself at this place, don’t give up. Explore if it’s possible there is something deeper going on and what you can do to clear these so you can breakthrough the plateau or finally conquer those self-sabotaging behaviors.
So, those are the practices and tips that keep me going when I just want to throw in the towel or I can’t seem to muster up my motivation. As I discuss in my other posts and my podcast, this is a lifelong journey of change and adjustment. If you start with a solid foundation and understand the value of making small, incremental changes and building on this over time, you will find yourself much more resilient through the course of this weight loss and health improvement journey.
So, if you are struggling to get yourself started or stay the course after a couple weeks, check these offers out. It’s designed to help get you going and be able to continue to make progress beyond that initial first month or two.
Alright, I hope you find this helpful and give some of this a try to keep yourself going when that motivation disappears. If you want to continue the pursuit of faith, fitness, and joy with me, please like and subscribe. You can also check out my podcast at https://faithfitnessjoy.podbean.com. You can follow me on Instagram and Facebook at Faith.Fitness.Joy. I hope to see you in the comments and on the socials!