Keeping motivated is so hard. There are way too many distractions (read: delicious food and comfy couches) out there to make having a healthy, active lifestyle an easy choice. For me, the best possible motivation is success - once you start to see changes in your body it's so much easier to keep going and make sure you push extra hard at your next workout and make healthy food choices. That's why it's so hard to kickstart yourself into a healthy lifestyle; you're starting from scratch with no successes to prove to you that it's worth it and it's working. But once you make a promise to yourself to do it and get your butt in gear, the motivation will start to creep in with the successes - and it's a great feeling.
The past week or two I've been feeling really motivated - super pumped to get to the gym (even at 6:00 AM!!!!), actually excited to eat healthy and make good choices, and not feeling AS pulled in by temptation (don't get me wrong, I'm still tempted by anything and everything, but the last little while I've been noticing it less and less). That's the thing about a healthy lifestyle - in many ways it's like a big snowball that keeps building and building: you have a great workout and you want to back it up with a good meal, you have a great day at the gym and in the kitchen and you want to make sure tomorrow lives up to it, you see pounds dropping on the scale and you want to make sure they continue to drop.
I'm so happy where I am right now: feeling really motivated, happy and content with my successes the last few weeks. So I am going to embrace it, because goodness knows in a few weeks I could be in another fitness rut. I'm also trying really hard to be easier on myself and tringy to get rid of the enormous food guilt I feel everytime I take a tiny bite of something bad for me (or, in most cases, a big bite...). It's hard and I'm a work in progress. I'm trying to embrace the guilt to make it work for me because I know my problems before were that I wasn't feeling guilty about eating an entire bag of chips in one sitting and that made it really easy to keep doing it (and consequently put on a lot of weight). Now, I try to embrace the guilt and use it as a motivator to either put the bad food down (after tasting it, of course), or better yet, to get to the gym the next day and kick my own ass! I feel that if I didn't feel guilty about eating a Cadbury Creme Egg (like I did yesterday, and it was delicious), it would be way too easy to continue eating them, not work out the next day, and wake up 3 months later with 25 pounds of weight back on - and I refuse to do that! So, I make the guilt work for me. But I am trying to tell myself that an occasionally indulgence doesn't warrant guilt - good food is one of those things that makes life worth living.
Obviously having some success on the scale and in the way my clothes are fitting makes it a lot easier not to feel guilty about a small indulgence (imagine if I'd recently put on weight and indulged in a Creme Egg? Guilt for days, I assure you), and that's why success, to me, is the ultimate motivation. It's a great feeling to see positive changes in your body and to realize your goals (and even better if others begin to notice too!) and it makes you want to keep going, to keep getting to feel those fantastic feelings again and again.
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