Motivation Pitfalls

Staying motivated in your weight loss or health improvement regimen is very hard work. My father who was a long time smoker used to criticize my mother about her weight. Until he had a triple bypass heart surgery and he himself had to lose weight. Today, he says its harder to lose weight than to quit smoking. Even thought his weight can now be a matter of life and death, it can be still be hard to hit the gym everyday.

Complacency will eat you alive without you ever being aware its happening. If you hit your weight loss goal, look in the mirror and think "Yeah, I look good. I deserve a day off from the gym", the next thing you know it might be two days.... then three.... then its "oh I'll start back up on Monday". Next thing you know you haven't been in the gym for over a month and your ass is back to wiggling like a bowl of jello. The key to avoiding the complacency pitfall is to never have an excuse. If you think you look good now, how much better are you going to look or feel if you just crushed your personal best at the bench press? Another way to avoid the trap is by tracking how many weeks in a row where you make it to the gym 4 or 5 days. Get a string of those going and you won't want to break it. The point here is to always have a goal.

Injuries are another huge motivation killer. I know. I'm working through a pretty bad one right now that pretty much eliminated all cardiovascular exercise from my routine. At the time it feels like a major set back and thoughts of giving up do happen. It's really easy to say "I'm just gonna stay out of the gym until this heals." Guess what, by the time you are feeling good your so out of the routine of going, you never make it back. The key to this pitfall (assuming the injury isn't something catastrophic) is to simply work around the injury. Are your knees hurting because of the pounding from the treadmill, try an elliptical or stationary bike. Not sure how to work around an injury? Ask your doctor or better yet one of the physical trainers in the gym.

Colds. Ah the killer of all motivation. Let's be honest, if your going through dysentery/vomiting probably best you stay home. In fact, please stay there. But for simple things like the common cold, one of the best things you can do is get your butt in the gym. But lets get real for a minute. Don't try to bust your personal one rep max on the leg press (or any other exercise). You have to be intelligent here and understand that the while the exercise is doing you good, you don't want to over tax the system and end up even sicker. This is probably one of the few times that your gym buddies should allow you to slack off bit. A general rule I've heard a couple of times now is that if the cold is above the shoulders, get your butt to the gym. But if its below that stay home (ie. if you have a case of the sniffles or a "tickle" in the throat you don't have a valid excuse).

There are tons of other motivation pitfalls you'll face in your journey. But the last one I want to talk about today is the lack of results. Nothing can kill one's motivation more than busting their ass in the gym while watching their diet closely and not seeing any changes on the scale. It sucks. In fact, in the first 3 weeks of my start I actually gained about 10 pounds. I seriously thought about quitting. If your doing the work in the gym and really being honest with yourself about what your eating, the weight will come off. You just have to put faith in the process and eventually it will happen. The body sometimes just needs time to adjust to what your asking from it. That being said, you shouldn't be using your weight as the only measure of success. Your weight can vary wildly from day to day (for me its as much as 2.5 lbs). You need other data points to help provide a complete picture. For example, if your running you should track the number of miles you can complete each week. If your weight training plot the amount of weight your doing over time. All great motivators.