You’re ready to make a change and be your healthiest, most energetic self. You’re going to exercise regularly, go to bed early, eat nutritious food and get your stress under control! But you also know that you’ve felt like this before – and that didn’t last.
Motivation is often only short-lived, so what do you do to make sure it stays high? This often comes back to setting up habits and making them easy to stick to. Let’s have a look at some ways that you can stay motivated with your healthy habits.
Expect plateaus – but know how to work through them
Unfortunately, plateaus are just a part of any health and fitness journey. You can experience a plateau with exercise, where you just stop seeing improvements. You can plateau with your goal itself such as weight loss or fat loss. Or it could be a combination of reasons!
A healthy journey is not linear, so occasional plateaus are to be expected. But if you want to stay motivated, you also need to have a plan to get yourself out of a plateau. <link to plateau blog>
Do what you enjoy doing
One of the biggest reason that motivation wanes in the first few weeks is because you do something you don’t like doing! You might:
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Eat foods that you despise (kale, anyone?)
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Go to the gym for exercise, even though you dread it
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Run, even though you can think of nothing more bland and unexciting
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Work out for too long and get bored
To make a health kick stick, we want it to be sustainable. And it’s not sustainable for you to do things you hate doing. Instead, we want you to choose things that you enjoy! That doesn’t mean you won’t feel blah from time to time about your food or movement, but it does reduce the risk.
Change it up a bit
Has it been a little while since you’ve changed up your exercise routine or your meal plan? If so, it might be time to make some tweaks.
One of the biggest reasons that people give up on health kicks and return to their old patterns is a brain chemical called dopamine. Dopamine is a ‘reward’ for your brain, so it does whatever it can to get a hit!
Unfortunately, when you remove things like junk food, you’re reducing something that gives a dopamine hit – and your brain doesn’t love this. But the good news is that there are healthy ways to get a dopamine fix, and one of the easiest ways is to try something new. This can mean:
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Going out and giving a different form of fitness a go – from dancing to rock-climbing
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Trying out a new gym class
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Cooking a new meal
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Travelling to a new location for an outdoor workout e.g. a local park or walking track
So by changing up some of your healthy habits, you can keep yourself feeling motivated for longer.
Go back to your goals
Whenever I have a client who is struggling to stick with a healthy habit, I will take them back to the goals we set to begin with. And when I say goals, I don’t mean ‘lose weight’ or ‘fit into my skinny jeans’. I mean the deeper whys, like ‘to feel more confident’ or ‘being able to run around after my kids’ . For more tips on how to hit your goals, check out my previous blog here:
These deeper goals are the ones that will keep us going when all of the superficial ones drop away.
Get some accountability
I always say that one of the biggest missing pieces on any health journey is accountability. Motivation is internal – it relies on you to get yourself going. But having someone on your team keeping you accountable means that you don’t always have to feel motivated to achieve your goals!
Accountability can be in many forms – asking your friends to support you, hiring a trainer or even joining a group of like minded women. My Reset & Thrive membership is one of these places – a place to work with like minded women, share goals, keep one another accountable and receive many tips and tricks for long term maintaining success. Head here for more info on Reset & Thrive.
