How do I keep myself motivated to lose weight and not give up after a couple weeks?

[SarahP]

Ok, so I want to lose a little bit of weight. I know what I need to do to lose it but my problem is motivating myself to keep it up. I start off with the best intentions, but within a week or two all motivation is lost.
I'm a single mum, so I can't go out with friends to work out to keep with the motivating side of things. So, do you have any tips I can use to keep myself motivated for more than a couple of weeks?

[Anonymous]

The key to losing weight isn't a crazy workout routine. The key to losing weight is diet. So once a week you need to come up with a meal plan. In fact, once you come up with 4-5 varied weekly meal plans you can just recycled them. You don't need to cut out any specific group of foods entire, you simply need correctly proportion everything to reflect your dietary goals.

Since your a mom, this change in dietary practice will also very likely positively impact your kid (s) since it has been shown that parents dietary activity often tend to reflect their kids dietary activity. If the parents eat a lot of fast food, very often the kids eat more fast food. If the parents prepare many healthy meals for themselves, the kids end up also eating healthier. So in that regard, you can see it as not only doing it for your own benefit but for the benefit of your children. For most parents, that's usually motivation enough.

While I would still suggest trying to workout some, you don't need to go crazy with it. I've developed long term diet plans that have led to 20-30 pounds of weightloss over a 3 month period without any sort of exercise plan involved. Simply creating a very strict diet plan and having that stuck to. Like I said you don't even have to cut anything out, just proportion correctly. Like one diet plan, the dessert for 3-4 nights was a piece of yellow cake with chocolate icing. Sounds pretty unhealthy right? But it was in proportion, and after a large meal (dinner). When you're already full, the small portion dessert isn't so small.

Diet is priority number one when it comes to weight loss. Cardio comes in after that. Muscle workouts are low priority, mainly aimed at minimizing muscle loss during the weightloss period.

[Anonymous]

You just do it even if it sucks or is painful. It's all about discipline. You set short term goals that will gradually step you towards you end game. For example I've done marathon races in the past, but for the past year or so I haven't been running at all. My treadmill broke and I was way too busy. I just started up training again. Three weeks ago I had a mental block on running 2 miles in a row when in the past I've done 26.2 miles. I just didn't want to do it, but that didn't stop me. I just push through that shit regardless of what my mind tells me. This morning I did 6 miles and my mental breaking point was at 5.5 miles but I kept going anyway. I will continue the mile stretch this week. Next week I will I will shoot for 7 but I'm a bad ass so even though I'm shooting for 7 I will probably do 9 just because I don't lay down for nobody. It's all about attitude. Your mind tells you this hurts, maybe I should stop and go at it another day, and then your soul says FUCK THAT I got this shit. It's fucking easy! Then you keep fucking going and don't stop.

[rthomas43]

Post pictures of end goals and stuff.

You're a mom? Don't you want to be healthy enough to see your child grow old? Do it for them :)

[SarahP]

Thank you! :)

[rthomas43]

You're welcome :)

[genericname85]

tell everybody about your plans so you are scared of their judgement if you fail to persevere. a thing i do is: i just set my goals and do it. it has to happen spontaneously and i force my self to not even question it.

[KhaysunDei]

just be natural about this and don't make it obvious you're going to lose weight or you'll fail. too much talk, and not enough action.