Fit Mums Friday Pt 2: How to get motivated and achieve your ideal body

Welcome back to part two of our health and fitness feature with Dan Pinch from Founder of Fit Mums.

“I want to drop 15 lbs, eat better and have more energy but I have no discipline and am incredibly lazy”.

This is how one of my recent clients explained her goals to me. Another said:

“I’ve wanted to lose weight for years. I know I need to exercise and eat better but I’ve just never had enough desire to make the effort”.

In fact, I have conversations that start this way on almost a daily basis. This may even be how you feel about your own fitness journey.

The problem is not that you’re lazy, or don’t have time, or don’t have the desire. The problem is that the fitness world is broken. It leads you to believe that real fitness is hard and complicated. That it takes time and that only the most dedicated will succeed.

This leads to the real crux of the issue. It leaves you feeling unmotivated.

So, naturally, we look for quick and easy fixes. Juice diets, weight loss pills, supplement programs, weight loss groups, anything that will give you fast results and take away the requirement for motivation. In this world, if there’s desire for an easy fix – one will be created, to line the pockets of greedy and untrustworthy opportunists.

It’s the job or real fitness professionals to be truthful, realistic and guide you through the process of establishing motivation, setting up realistic goals and helping you achieve them in an attainable and sustainable way.

Motivation can be taught, coached and internaliSed easily. It doesn’t take time to obtain, nor does it take outrageous effort to sustain. Yet it is the single biggest factor that will ensure your fitness success.

This article will detail exactly how you can create motivation for yourself and easily make a permanent change to your outlook on health, fitness and weight loss.

The Necessary Reality: Resetting Expectations

First, I need to say something that won’t be popular. But it’s necessary and true. People will say it’s rubbish. All the forums say different. All the adverts claim otherwise. But here it is:

When it comes to getting lean and losing weight, there is no quick fix.

Let me reiterate, this is important to understand and internalise. There is no magic pill. There is no magic fix that will help you permanently reduce body fat, quickly. Nothing you can do or put in your body for 30 days will transform you for the better.

You know what a medical professional will say if you tell them you want to lose weight? It won’t be take a pill or quit food, that’s for sure.

As painful as this can be to accept, understanding this now is a good thing. It will save you a lifetime of despair and a lot of money.

The great news is that the alternative is much better for you and will leave you looking and feeling great for the rest of your life.

Now that doesn’t mean you need to overhaul your entire life or doing anything drastic. On the contrary, before you even do anything physically, you need to find your motivation.

4 Steps to Find Your Motivation

Starting the fitness journey is the most difficult step for a many mums. The constant pressures of time, responsibility, self-doubt and bad information can lead to a total lack of motivation which reduces the likelihood you’ll ever start your fitness journey.

I’ve distilled the simple steps required in order to find your motivation which will see you start your journey and continue well in to the future.

STEP 1: Why? Your Emotional Purpose

When it comes to motivation, nothing beats a strong emotional desire. So, the first step is to simply define your emotional purpose. The ‘why’.

Ask yourself ‘why’ you want to exercise and eat well, but make sure the answer is not something physical. “I want to lose my baby weight” is too vague and not strong enough emotionally.

Go further.

What would losing this weight actually mean to you? How would your life change? What difference would it make to the activities you do? What could you experience? How would it positively affect those around you?

Here are a few common examples. It may mean feeling:

• Confident in public
• Joy when you look in the mirror
• Secure in stepping on the scales
• Sexy naked
• Empowered to be a great parent, partner and friend

STEP 2: What? Your Specific Goal

Now it’s time to think about the physical changes you want to achieve in order to meet your emotional desires.

This goal needs to be specific and realistic.

It’s only in being specific and realistic that the goal becomes real and tangible. It also gives you a specific end measure to aim towards.

Take some time to really think it through. The more time you spend creating something tangible now, the better your chances of achieving it in the long run.

Some example goals could be:

• I want to lose 5lbs of body fat
• I want to visibly reduce my mummy tummy by 50%
• I want to reduce cellulite on my bum and legs
• I want to have the energy to last an entire day

STEP 3: How? Your Method

Your method defines how you will feel about your journey on a day to day basis. If it’s too complex, too difficult or has too many facets to it, you will feel like you’re embarking on an uphill battle right from the start, and you’ll quickly come to resent the process and likely give up.

Your method needs to do 3 things:

1. Start small, with just one thing
2. Make failure difficult
3. Progress incrementally

Consider this example where two people decide to start a fitness regime at the same time.

The first person decides to reduce calories, cycle carbohydrates depending on daily exertion and do high intensity workouts 5-6 times a week.

The second decides to eat the same as they presently do, except they will simply eat slower and stop eating when satisfied, and complete a mild 5-minute home workout while their baby naps.

If we stop here, you may assume the first person will see the best results as they’re expending more energy and consuming less. A sound principle in itself.

In reality, what will happen is that by day 3 the first person will be sore all over, feeling under nourished and craving the foods they so abruptly stopped eating therefore enforcing the feeling that exercise is hard and eating well is impossible.

Meanwhile, the second person is steadily continuing, easily able to manage their small changes. After some time, and these changes are now ingrained, the second person can add a couple of minutes to the exercise routine and begin cutting out the worst of their junk foods.

In the long run, the second person is establishing a healthy life that will see them gradually, yet continually, making progress towards their long term goals where the first person has long given up and is back looking for the quick fix because health living is just too difficult.

The first person starts small; they make it so easy that failure is almost more difficult than adherence, and these early wins and consistency allow room for ongoing progress to be made.

Over the next two weeks, Fit Mums Friday will be covering the small and easy exercise and nutrition steps you can take to start your own fitness journey.

For those who want to get started right away, the Free Fit Mums 30-Day Ultimate Beginner Weight Loss Guide for Mums is the perfect starting point.

STEP 4: Supercharge your Motivation with Accountability

If establishing your emotional purpose is the cornerstone in finding your motivation, implementing an accountability measure is the way to supercharge it and make failure more painful than adherence.

There are two ways to set up accountability in to your motivation strategy:

Remind yourself

This involves setting up reminders to yourself so you’re getting constant nudges of what you’re trying to achieve and why.

The first thing you can do is set up a notification on your phone that flashes up every morning to remind you what your emotional purpose is. This sets you up nicely for the day.

The second, if you’re brave, is a very powerful visual reminder. Take a ‘before’-style picture of yourself and place it somewhere prominent that you’ll encounter throughout your day. This can be the background of your phone or on your fridge door.

External Accountability

This is where the fun really starts.

External accountability is about having somebody other than yourself involved in ensuring you progress towards your goals.

One of the most effective ways to do this is to declare your intentions publicly. This can be on your Facebook or Twitter, on your blog, or here in the comments.

When you declare your goals publicly, while scary, it gives you that extra drive to follow through and prove to the world how awesome you are. It also gives people the chance to motivate and encourage you, which is a huge boost.

How to get started

Get started right now and get yourself motivated to finally get that body you want.

In the comments section, tell us the following:

1. 1. What do you want to achieve?

1. What would achieving this goal mean to you?

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If you missed Part 1 of Fit Mums Friday where we covered 5 Posture Fixes to Make you Look Slimmer Instantly, read it here.

Check back next week for Part 3 of Fit Mums Friday where we’ll start diving in to the simple methods you can use to get your fitness journey started.