Finding the motivation to lose weight is difficult, especially as weight loss is not just about physical changes in your body, but also about adjusting your emotional relationship with body image, food, and exercise. Sticking with a lifestyle change is never easy, with motivation easily lost due to a number of factors. Here are some great ways to increase your motivation throughout your journey to fitness-

Make your Goals Visible

A simple way of starting your self-improvement is by writing a list of all that you want to achieve. Once complete, your list may seem daunting and leave you wanting to hide it away, but instead keep it in a highly visible area to ensure that you are constantly aware of why you are working so hard to change yourself. Being able to cross off your goals once they are reached will be a great way to stay motivated.

Don’t Feel Guilty

For some people, feeling guilty can be a great way to increase motivation, but for most, it can be incredibly demotivating. Feeling guilty, or feeling like a failure, may make you think that there is no point in continuing with your weight loss regime. If you are not reaching your goals, or meeting your targets as quickly as you want, don’t feel guilty and be tempted to give up. Instead, continue to try, and if you need to revise your goals, or adjust them slightly to meet your needs.

Reward Yourself

Throughout your journey, it is important you reward yourself for your effort and hard work. Ensuring that you are having a day off’ from exercise, or a suitable treat can help you maintain, or increase, your motivation. You may even want to implement reward goals as an incentive to keep going. A gift to yourself when you’ve reached a certain level of fitness, or have reached a target weight, will reward you for all your hard work and encourage you to continue with your health kick.

Mix Up your Routine

Just because you are working hard to achieve an end goal, doesn’t mean that the process should become mundane. Adding variety will make achieving your goals fun and much easier. Making changes to your routine can help you stay focused, so have a healthy variety of meal plans and create a work-out plan that involves a wide range of activities.

Get Others Involved

Going it alone can make your whole routine seem dull, but getting others involved can help make your new lifestyle more exciting. Having an exercise buddy will make working out more fun, help increase your motivation and add a gentle competitive element to your weight loss. Being able to discuss healthy meal plans with others will let you add variety to your diet as you swap cooking tips and recipes.

Use NLP to Work on Your Positive Mentality

Having a positive mentality is essential when trying to lose weight. Viewing your new regime negatively often means that you have little motivation, making it difficult to jumpstart your lifestyle change. By improving your emotional understanding, you can increase your self-motivation. Taking a short NLP course can help you understand, and change, your emotional relationship with food and exercise, increasing your motivation throughout your lifestyle change.

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Beth Stubbings works for Performance Partnership. She thinks that it is important to have a high level of motivation in order to successfully achieve a healthier lifestyle and lose weight.