Lately I’ve reading quite a few posts and articles about motivation, more specifically how to stay motivated to drop those pounds and get in shape.

Some are quite frankly nauseating and you get the feeling they have been written by some fitness junkie who for some strange reason actually enjoys exercising. Words like inspiration, drive, commitment, love, life, healthy followed by sentences that include do it for you, how can you love someone else if you don’t love you, read something inspiring, do it for your family and one of my personal favorites you will actually start to enjoy working out.

No…No..aah…ahh..not in a million years will I ever enjoy working out. No amount of positive reading is going to change the fact that I hate working out. Some people are born to run, others are born to sit on the couch and watch people run. Can you guess which category I fall into?

So here’s my problem with these self help, motivational pieces. They don’t work. If they did, people wouldn’t spend billions of dollars a year trying out the latest fad diets, joining gyms, eating, or should I say drinking those awful milkshakes that apparently are your meal for the day and buying books from the diet, fitness and motivation sections.

Now, some of you may have googled something like how to stay motivated when trying to lose weight and stumbled across my blog. By now you have probably gathered that I’m not going to be providing you with the answer to your question.
Here’s why, I don’t believe anyone else can convince you to motivate yourself.

The reality is that some of you are probably desperate for change, many of you have probably tried and failed and most of you just want to find that thing, the golden holy grail that switches on your brain to positive and gets you motivated.

I’m sorry to break it to you but the odds of you finding that on a website or book are probably pretty low.

Here’s one thing I might be able to motivate you with, if you don’t make changes you will probably die. Well let’s face it, we are all going to die but some will live a long life and others will not. Perhaps you can find some motivation in that, do you want to live a long life or a short one? Feeling motivated?

In essence, you have to just do it. You might fail many times and you know what? That’s okay. Most people fail at something, well, unless you are Tiger Woods, he doesn’t fail.
Even the richest man in the world fails sometimes. Mr Bill Gates, Mr Microsoft, Mr the Internet isn’t going to amount to anything, Mr Vista. Need I say more?

Failure is part of life, it really is. How can you learn and grow if you don’t fail? I truly believe that there is no-one on this planet who is perfect, apart from Tiger Woods playing golf.
The trick is to learn from those failures, work out what happened to get you off course and try again. You can’t give up, that’s the real truth. Let yourself own that bad day, week or month. We all have them. Even the ones you think are so perfect, well they aren’t.

And lastly, don’t be so hard on yourself.


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