What's your why?

[815165]

Hey guys and gals,

I've been struggling to find the correct motivation to get started again. I have had periods of my life when I was fit and ate healthy on the daily, but these last couple years I am in the worst shape of my life. I just can't seem to find my "why" to commit and take this seriously. I know I need to lose weight and I really want to get off my blood pressure meds, that's my primary reason. I also want to get in shape to find another girlfriend, because online dating really sucks. With these reasons I still can't gain the momentum and this puzzles the f$ck out of me. Anyways, I heard about this forum and how helpful the community can be. I figure that by joining I can take the first step to some positive change.

-Thomas

[anashine]

I love being fit. I love being able to join in sports, play in playgrounds, jump up quickly, run fast when I need to etc etc

I've been quite fit most of my life. But in my early thirties I had a surgery that left me so weak I could not get up off the floor without crawling to furniture for support. It was depressing and led to weight gain. I hated being overweight because I was not comfortable sleeping with rolls of skin digging into each other, my back pain got worse, and none of my clothes fit. Everything dug in unless it was stretchy gym wear.

For the last eight years I've been working on getting my strength back. I did not want to spend my best years feeling fifty years older. It's a life long thing. I want to be this strong all my life.

[momomotv]

I do it because it helps with my depression and anxiety and you know when you feel that... Feeling I guess of accomplishment at the end of your reps or the day it makes all the hard work worth it

[melDorado]

Hobby
Stress relief
Socialising

To be honest the main reason i go gym these days is to stop myself losing everything I've worked so hard to achieve already

Hope you find your mojo bro
My advice = find what you enjoy and stick to that. Its gotta be fun at the end of the day

[lukepeter]

I get it...

For me - its less about the why and more about the how - Why motivates you to start, how you go about the process is what determines if you will adhere or not. What has worked for me is small, sustainable changes. Don't treat it like a race to lose x amount of kilograms, look at it like day 1 of the rest of your life, but with one small, better, decision. Once making that one small good choice becomes an ingrained, disciplined, habit - make another one. Like with lifting, behavior changes should be a progression (at least in my experience). Ultimately, it was willpower, or the lack thereof that got you here (it was for me), and it will require the daily strengthening of your willpower to build the habits that will make a long term difference in your life.

Routine measurement - weather its a waist size, a weigh in, how long it takes you to run a mile etc. are all tools to keep you in check. If you find you miss a weekly weigh in and dont want to get on the scale because you had a bad weekend - thats the time to get on the scale for a reality check.

Logging here on BB.com has been a great tool for me over the last two years, there is a great community of like minded folk that will help keep you on the straight and narrow if you wish it.

Motivation, momentum etc. are fickle fuel sources. You have to want to change more than you want to eat that extra burger (and lord, do I want that extra burger), every day the small decisions you have made to consciously make better choices will add up into progress.

Personally - lifting weights 4 times a week (only half an hour a session) and weighing myself once a week did the trick w.r.t. routine. I also choose to stick to specific macro targets (its not that hard when you get used to it) that are aligned with my body and lifestyle goals. I wont pretend like its all going to be sunshine and roses and steady progress, I fall off the proverbial wagon from time to time, and I purposefully relax my discipline so that I can enjoy social events with my family and not be "that guy". Every ****ty eating weekend has been reset by me dragging my arse back into the gym on Monday, and getting the set done ("done is better than perfect") - its a trigger that gets me back in line - you need to find something like that. If you want an accountability partner I, or any of the myriad of people here would likely gladly assist

Discipline and strength for the journey Thomas. It is achievable.

[JSim83]

These were the things that motivated me to start losing weight and to change my lifestyle:

- Various health issues
- Feeling tired all the time.
- Not being able to do any sports. I grew up playing many different sports and I really liked doing that, but at adult age I stopped it and gained a whole bunch of weight. I really missed that active lifestyle that I used to have and hated what I had become.
- For the first time in my life the scale showed a number over 130 kg.
- Not being able to find big enough clothes from normal clothes shops. In general XXL is the biggest available size here in Finland and most XXL sized clothes were too small for me. Also the biggest jeans available were in most shops were size 40 waist and it was too small for me. Buying clothes just felt so humiliating, because more often than not I just could not find big enough sizes.

Thomas, you can do this! I also urge you to keep posting to this thread on how you progress. At least for me keeping a log has helped me to stay on track.

[Imp81318]

My motivation was quite simple - I stepped on the scale one day and say 205 lbs. That was about the heaviest I'd ever been - usually 200 lbs had been the cutoff point where I'd decide to changes things and drop 10-20 pounds. My general lifestyle and eating habits have always been such that my "normal" consumption was right around maintenance so I'd gain weight very slowly over the course of months or years, so every few years I'd hit 200 lbs, drop to 180-190 before losing interest in my diet/exercising and put the weight back on. This time I'd been hovering around 200 pounds for a few months and had gotten rather comfortable at that weight, and that was when I saw 205. It was just a new number, and made me realize for some reason that I was allowing myself to creep up every so slowly so I decided to try to learn about nutrition for the first time in my life. I found this website and started tracking my calories and following the Fierce 5 program at home. Since I had never been an athlete or worked out seriously before, I met with a trainer a few times to learn proper form on a few movements. From there it had just been a year-long progression where the more I learned about nutrition and started to see how the changes I had made were actually working, the more interested I became in nutrition and exercise and fitness. And now I truly feel like I've gotten to the point where I have changed my lifestyle around and it no longer feels like a short-term change to my habits, I truly feel like I've changed the way I think about food and exercise. I feel better, and I'm so much more well-suited for tackling day-to-day tasks like projects around the house and playing with my kids. And I actually enjoy working out now.

After Edit: I realize that's a whole lot more information that just what initially motivated me, but I think understanding my story helps to see how my motivation has changed over the course of my journey to this point. Maybe I'm wrong about that...