The hardest part of exercise is just getting started. Once you’ve begun it gets easier and easier.
Everyone of us has a collection of habits. Who we are and how we look are in many ways a product of those habits.
The only way to redefine yourself , to start achieving leanness rather than merely worrying about overweight, is to acquire a new set of habits. How do you do that? By doing things over and over again until they become your new habits.
Put succinctly, who you are is what you do. In other words, you can become someone else by doing something else.
Get Ready
How do you get yourself to take that first step?
For starters, you need to decide whether you are really ready to do what it takes to lose that weight.
Motivation is probably the most important factor, and understanding the benefits is a strong motivating factor. this is because regardless of what your biggest motivator is, it’s something you’re going to want to keep in the forefront of your mind for all those times when you just can’t seem to shake off your initial.
Believe in Yourself
Perhaps the hardest thing you have to do, harder than changing your eating habits, harder than working exercise into your life, is to change the way you talk to yourself.
Don’t act all innocent. Maybe you don’t talk aloud, but if you are a human being, you do talk to yourself. Like cartoon characters who have an angel perched on one shoulder and a devil on the other, all of us carry on internal dialogues with ourselves.
Unfortunately for many of us, the devil often gives the angel a boot. And the devil is clever. Not only does he tempt us into sin (“Hey, you’re fat already! What’s another slice of cake going to matter”), he has an even more subtle tool for undercutting our self-confidence: the “if…..then” way of thinking. “If you can just lose 20 pounds,” he tells you, “then you’ll feel great about yourself.”
This kind of thinking will get you nowhere.
If you are going to stay motivated , you have to learn to like yourself first. Don’t undertake a program because you can’t stand the way you look right now. Do it because you like yourself for who you are and because you want to improve the quality of your life.
Accentuate the Positive
One of the most important things that you can do, is to keep reminding yourself of your accomplishments. Nothing will short-circuit your efforts more quickly than focusing on all the weight you haven’t lost. Focus instead on the weight you have lost, and you’ll find encouragement in each small victory.
People often overlook the benefits of even a small amount of weight loss.
So if, to invert the cliche, you can look at your gut as half empty instead of half full (and remember when it was all full), you’ll keep yourself psyched to keep going forward.
