Exercise motivation tips

Do you have a love/hate relationship with exercise? Or maybe you just love to hate it? For some people, once they do it, they really enjoy it—even crave it occasionally when they miss a workout—and then wonder why they have such a hard time doing it regularly.

Or you may be one of those people who have a hate/hate relationship with it. You never enjoy it. Still, you know it is a huge key to weight loss success and good health, if not the key.

Here are some tips that may help.

Whether you love exercise or hate it, sometimes you just don't feel like it. Here's a tip: Give yourself permission to stop.

You get up in the morning and the LAST THING ON EARTH you feel like doing is putting on your workout clothes and hopping on that treadmill. Feel free to think about how much you don’t want to do it while you pull your T-shirt over your head (you know, the one that says “Every time I hear the dirty word ‘exercise’ I wash my mouth out with chocolate”). Rant and rave. Curse Tony Little and Denise Austin and that monster Gilad. Just get dressed. Once you’re feeling positively murderous, start walking, stepping, rowing, whatever you do. BUT. Give yourself permission to stop after 10 minutes if you 100% abso-bloomin-lutely cannot go another minute. It’s okay.

There’s an excellent chance that once you get started, you will perk up and start feeling better and will complete your workout. But even if you don’t, you are allowed to quit. At least you did 10 minutes, and that’s way better than nothing. And you will probably want to keep going 99% of the time. Okay, maybe 90–95%. Which is still pretty good odds.

Try it!

How to look forward to exercise

Have I taken leave of my senses? Can a person actually look forward to exercise? Or at least not dread it?

Yes, oh doubtful one, you can. Here are some things to consider:

1. Make sure that your goals are attainable. Maybe you want/need to lose 50 pounds. That’s a lot of weight. It doesn’t sound do-able for the average person. So break it up into smaller chunks. Say, “I’m going to lose 10 pounds.” Lose that 10 pounds and then just do it four more times. In my case, I don’t always feel like exercising until after I get started, but I wouldn’t be able to get started if my goals were as daunting as they used to be.

2. Don’t have an “all-or-nothing” attitude. I used to be this way. If I couldn’t exercise for a good solid hour a day, I felt like a failure, like it just wasn’t going to be good enough. When I was able to go a full hour, it was great. But more often than not, I couldn’t, so I spent the whole session feeling bad about not doing enough and not focusing on the pleasure of moving. And I tended to dread it the next day.

3. Focus on the positives. Be happy with whatever exercise you have the time or energy for. That’s not to say you shouldn’t strive to improve, go a little longer, work a little harder, but regardless of workout length or intensity, be happy with yourself for doing what you can, and focus on getting the most out of it.

4. Let those endorphins do their thing. There seems to be sort of a physical addiction going on when you exercise regularly, and not in a bad way. It’s hard to describe, but when I haven’t exercised, my body just feels the urge to move. It’s like an itch, and the only way to scratch it is to get moving. It’s a cheap, legal drug. Now that’s the kind of addiction I can recommend.

5. Remind yourself of the benefits. The craving for exercise, and the satisfying of that craving, are much more rewarding than filling a craving for sweets, because the feeling lasts much longer. After a Twinkie, all I want is another Twinkie and a soda to wash it down. And then something salty. And more soda. And then something sweet again. In contrast, after 20-30 minutes on my elliptical, the good feeling lasts all day.

I hope these tips will help you—they’ve made a huge difference for me.


Skinny Clothes

I seem to have this bad habit of buying things that are just a teensy bit too small for me with the idea that I’ll be losing 5 pounds soon and then it’ll fit perfectly. Twenty pounds in the wrong direction later, it’s still hanging there in the closet, taunting me. Doggone it, I’m not going to stand for it anymore! I’m going to WEAR these clothes! Eventually. Hopefully they’ll be back in style by then :)

I keep clothes like that hanging where I can see them, right in front of my elliptical. It reminds me how much I love wearing cute clothes, and how much fun it will be to shop for stylish clothes rather than the shapeless boring stuff I’ve been hiding behind. Not that I have all that much style; I’m always asking my sister, Do these go together? What shoes would I wear with this? etc. But if shopping were to become fun again, I think I would do okay.