How to move past motivation.

You are looking at making a change in your life. Finding yourself wanting to lose some weight, gain some muscle or just increase your physical activity for general fitness. At this point you are probably feeling pretty good about your decision, making plans and mapping out your future life changes. It’s a great feeling, and the motivation you get at that time is a great catalyst to get things started. The problem comes from the fact though that motivation is a temporary substance, like your car’s gas tank it will run out.

The success you are looking for will come not from your motivation to start and continue your goals, but from the habits you will build from your motivation stage. At the beginning it’s important to use your motivation to build strong habits; this is a critical stage in your goals. It’s rarely someone’s favorite time, but cracking down and spending a month doing your diet our routine to the letter can and will lead to an easier time down the road.

When I started I was faced with 250lbs of weight loss that I was going to be fighting through. That was years of my life I was committing to lifestyle changes that were alien to how I was living my life at the time. Choosing keto as my road path I had a plan and set goals to measure and follow at the start. I meal prepped nearly everything for the entire week and did not cheat at all on my plans and diet. Eating out with friends was tough in this stage as I would either sit there and not eat or just decide that I would not go to help me focus on my immediate goal to build my habits. The results were worth those rough few weeks of a month however. I had built eating habits that I kept reinforcing, but was comfortable being able to free-style vs following recipes step by step from a pre-formed plan.

When you say people say that weight loss is about making lifestyle changes they are correct. But I think it needs to be put in simpler terms. What that means is that you are building habits and working towards changing your preferences, tastes and thoughts themselves. I’m not saying that goals like weight loss ever are truly easy at any one point, but if you build yourself into a routine where you don’t have to actively and constantly fight with your urges. That is how you find your success.

Question to answer down below: Do you have any suggestions yourself on how to build habits? What about breaking them?

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