Getting Motivated to Lose Weight

Video Transcript

"My name is Christine Marquette and I'm a registered and licensed dietitian with the Austin Regional Clinic, and I'm going to talk to you about getting motivated to lose weight. Now motivation truly comes from within yourself. You really can't have anybody else motivate you to really do anything, so if you are interested in losing weight, really the first step is to ask yourself why you want to lose weight. Do you want to lose weight for health reasons? Do you want to lose weight for vanity? You know, because you want to look better. What's the main reason why you want to lose weight? And use that as part of your motivation to start a program. Once you actually get started in your program, some ways that a lot of people find to help stay motivated is to again, remind themselves over and over again, the reason why that they are trying to lose weight and to actually use visuals. Say for example, you were very thin in high school and you put on weight during college. If you have any pictures of yourself when you were in high school, try to keep those around so that you can look at yourself and think "yeah, you know what? I really was that thin person. I can totally get back to that weight, or at least get that close to that weight." So pictures can be a very strong motivator. Another thing is to think about things that you could reward yourself with. Say for example, break your weight loss into small goals. Maybe you you want to lose ten pounds in a couple of weeks. You've reached that goal, reward yourself with a new outfit, or going to a concert or some kind of an activity that you really want to do, but again, only go do that activity, only get that new outfit if you meet your goal. Another way that some people find to stay motivated is actually kind of the opposite way, to actually use a punishment if they don't meet their goals, so for example, if you don't use that ten pounds in two weeks, then you have to put five dollars into your money jar. That could be a punishment jar, in a sense, so it actually is a good thing. Money can be a good motivator, if you have that money in there, then you know eventually, that if you actually do reach your goal, then you can go back to that money jar and use it to pay for a particular reward that you were looking at, so there's a lot of different things you can use to actually keep yourself motivated to lose weight."