Motivation
Posted by leah on Jun 19, 2008
Found a fantastic article about motivation on ZenHabits. Highly recommended if you struggle to stay motivated in your health (or other) goals.
Staying Motivated - what works for me
Posted by leah on May 24, 2008
Staying motivated is the hardest part, for most people, of making the kind of lifestyle changes that they need to make to be healthier. I think almost everyone has, at one point or another, made a New Years resolution to lose weight. You eat salads for a few days, join a gym, try a few workout videos, and then two weeks later you’re back to eating junk and spending a lot more time watching tv than exercising. I’d like to share what has worked for me in the past, and hopefully these things will work for other people too.
I think one trick to staying motivated is taking small steps instead of trying to do it all at once. It’s true that you won’t get results as quickly, but it’s a lot easier to make a small change and stick with it than it is to make drastic changes in your life all at once.
After I finished college, my lifestyle became a lot more sedentary - instead of walking from class to class on a large campus, I sat at a desk all day working. Instead of most of my friends living walking distance from me, I started having to drive to social events. I probably went from getting at least an hour of exercise every day, without thinking about it, to about 15 minutes. To make matters worse, my office provided lots of snacks and lunches, and after being a broke college student for four years, I couldn’t turn down free food. I gained weight. Not a lot, and it was gradual over a couple years, but I went up about two jeans sizes. I didn’t worry about it much at first, since everyone seems to gain a few pounds after college, but one day I realized that I wasn’t just bigger - I was also really out of shape. I had lost my muscle tone, and I got winded really quickly. Even though I didn’t look very big, I was overweight for my small boned frame, and unhealthily out of shape.
So I made some small changes. First, I stopped eating french fries. I don’t actually like them that much, but when I went out with coworkers for a drink, I would mindlessly munch on them whenever someone ordered a basket for the table. I started walking on my lunch break sometimes. I lost five pounds, and it was easy, but then the weight loss stopped. I was really happy that my small changes had helped, but I realized if I actually wanted to get in shape, I needed to make more drastic changes.
This is the phase where motivation can get really tricky. Once you’ve gotten in the habit of doing a few small things, you feel like you can do anything, and it’s easy to make the mistake again of trying to do it all at once. I went to the gym and jumped right into classes that were too difficult, so I quickly stopped attending them.
That’s when I realized I needed something more than wanting to lose another five pounds to motivate me. So here’s my next tip: once you’ve made some small changes, try to find ways to make the next change enjoyable. In my case, I needed to figure out a way to make the gym more fun, so that I would look forward to going. I had always liked yoga, since I’m naturally flexible, so I found a yoga class I liked at a convenient time, and I went every week. As I got stronger and more coordinated, I found that I looked forward to my class each week. I also felt great every time I worked out, so other kinds of exercise became enjoyable too.
To make a long story short, I became someone who exercised regularly, and I started enjoying it so much that I started training to teach other people. I took and passed a certification course to teach group exercise classes, and because I liked yoga in particular so much, I took an anatomy and physiology class for yoga teachers as a first step toward the (expensive and time consuming) yoga teacher certification process.
Then I made a really big lifestyle change - I decided to have a baby. This completely disrupted my workout habits because for the first three months, I was so exhausted I could barely keep my eyes open at the end of the workday, much less exercise for an hour before going home.
Here’s the next lesson I learned about motivation. Sometimes life will get in the way of what you think your goals are, and you might have to take a few steps back before you can go forward again. During the second and third trimesters of my pregnancy, I walked and took prenatal yoga. I was really easy on my body and never pushed myself very hard. It felt right for me at that time, and I wanted to keep my baby and myself safe and healthy, and my old workouts were too much for that stage of my life. I couldn’t wait to get active again once the baby was born.
Little did I know how hard the recovery from childbirth would be. For the first two weeks after my son was born, I could barely walk. Everything was hard, and everything hurt. Soon I started feeling better, of course, and I’ve been gradually increasing the amount and intensity of exercise I do over the last month or so. And guess what? Exercise is something I’m starting to enjoy again, because I feel so good when I do it. I’m not in as good of shape as I was before I got pregnant, but I will be, and this time it’s going a lot faster and is a lot easier because I’ve done it before and I know that the reward is feeling better and having more energy, not just looking better or wearing a certain jeans size.