What's Your Motivation?

Last year when I first began my healthy lifestyle journey I came across a website that is full of wonderful tips and advice on all things fitness. One of her blog posts was about visual motivation and I found it very moving.


The first thing you should ask yourself when you start any kind of new adventure is why? Why am I doing this? What am I hoping to get out of it? What is your motivation? I've heard soooooo many people say that they were losing weight for someone else. Whether it's a guy, girl, grandma, aunt, uncle, parent, etc...the only person that you should lose weight for is YOURSELF! If anyone else has an issue with the way you look or how much you weigh, that's their problem. Are you comfortable with yourself the way you are? Are you happy with your health? If so, that's what matters.


For me, my motivation is my family. I want to set a good example for my children and show them that even though we are surrounded by this yummy food, it isn't always healthy and of course we can always make a choice to eat healthier. My husband loves the way I look and always has, he tells me all of the time that if I didn't lose the weight he wouldn't care, as long as I'm healthy. I'm the one that has a problem with the way my clothes fit and what number pops up on the scale when I step on.


I can't tell y'all how many times I was told that I needed to put some meat on my bones when I was younger. I ate nonstop and never gained an ounce growing up. My grandmother would tell me all of the time that I was too thin, I needed to gain some weight. Guess what happened when I grew up and developed into a woman, that same grandmother who told me I needed to put some meat on my bones and that I was too thin started telling me I was fat and needed to lose weight. She was very proud of me with my 18 pounds lost last year but the minute she even thought that I had gained anything back she made snide and rude comments about it. She would make comments such as "I do believe you've gained all of that weight back that you lost" and the always lovely passive aggressive comments like "are you still working out" and "what have you been eating"? I told her several times to stop and that I didn't need her making comments about me that are just hateful. Go pick on someone else already, we're surrounded by family members who desperately need to lose weight, why are you singling me out? I have learned to ignore her and try not to let her comments and questions get to me but they still do.


I started focusing on my why and what motivates me to keep going. I'm the type of person who needs to write stuff down, I might have told y'all this in my introduction, I can't remember. I am a visual learner so actually seeing the numbers going down on the scale is very motivating to me. It can also be counterproductive and backfire on me as well. We have all heard that muscle weighs more than fat and we have all seen that picture of 5 pounds of fat next to 5 pounds of muscle and the muscle is significantly smaller, it's no secret. I started focusing on the scale too much rather than focusing on how I feel and how my clothes are fitting.


I was always the girl who would start a challenge group and not take measurements, just weight. Week after week I saw other people posting their measurements on Facebook and they had lost inches but it didn't phase me, all I was worried about was that damn scale! I knew after reading this blog post from Beach Ready Now that I needed to do something different. I went to the Dollar Tree (where everything's $1...can't get much more frugal than that) and bought two small containers and some of the glass beads that we use to put in our Beta fish bowls when we were younger. I went home and I labeled one "Pounds Down" and the other "Pounds to Go" and put the appropriate amount of beads in each container.


The next thing I did was have my hubby take my measurements and using this printable from Beach Ready Now (I think it's safe to say that I have a minor girl crush on Kim from BRN or maybe I just visit her blog way too much) I began to keep track of my measurements. I weigh myself every Sunday or Monday, depending on my mood, and then have my hubby take my measurements again. Well well well, what do you know, that dang scale that was giving me so much grief, well it's still giving me grief considering it hasn't gone down any, but it's gone up! I was so angry at myself. Then I remembered that I needed to look at my measurements. SURPRISE!!! I had lost almost 10" overall since I took my first measurements 3 weeks before. You know how much power that scale had over me at that point? NONE!!! That's what I get for not taking my measurements and strictly relying on my scale.


I'm totally getting off topic here, we were talking about motivation and visual motivation. I guess you could say that the comparison of my measurements served as somewhat of a visual motivator but the containers with the glass beads were even better. Every time I moved a bead over to the "pounds down" jar it felt like a little bit of weight (pun intended) was lifted off of my shoulders.


So, if you're someone who would benefit from visual motivation, consider doing something like this. Oh and, don't forget to take your measurements!