How to Stay Motivated with Healthy Changes

The time has come and you decided to start making some healthy changes in your lifestyle. You know what your goals are and you are determined to reach them. The next couple of weeks you are head strong in reaching your goals. Then comes the third to fourth week and you see that you are starting to go back to your old habits. Now you are asking yourself , " What happened? I was so determined to make these changes." Well what happened was , you lost motivation. Without motivation you are not going to stay on track for very long. So you need to find a way to stay motivated and stick with it.

Healthy Eating-Staying Motivated:

You are wanting to eat healthier so that you feel healthier. Well for starters you need to get rid of all the junk food and sodas out of your house. Get rid of them completely. Make sure that every time you go shopping you only buy healthy foods and snacks. When you are in the beginning of making a lifestyle change and are wanting to start eating healthier, you can not have junk food at all. During the first few months your body and your will power can not handle junk food in moderation. One candy bar can undo the whole thing and send you back into your unhealthy habits. After the first few months with out junk food, then you can start to add these back in moderation. At this point you will have become pretty well set in your healthy ways.

To stay motivated make sure everyone in the home knows what your lifestyle changes are. Ask them to respect your decision to start eating healthy. When you have the support of your family you can successfully make these changes.

Also if the life style changes are to help lose weight , clip pictures of women out of magazines and post them on your fridge and cabinets. These pictures will help as a visual aid to keep you focused and on track. Don't look for pictures of slim model types. Find pictures of healthy height weight proportioned women. When looking at real women who are healthy you can keep your goals realistic also.

Exercise-Staying Motivated:

We all need exercise in one form or another but it is hard to get motivated to do this every day. To keep motivated to exercise, you will need to find a buddy. When you have someone to exercise with you are less likely to get bored and just quit. I find that getting my five year old son on board with me makes exercising fun. We spend about 30 minutes in front of the TV in the living room working out together. We never keep a work out session serious. Instead we goof off and just have fun trying to make each other laugh while following along with the workout tape. He keeps me motivated because to him this is just fun and games so he is constantly everyday telling me to come and join him with the tape. So if you have kids grab them up and having them work out with you.

Friends are also great for keeping you motivated when you need to exercise. It is proven that if you have a person that you set up exercise time with, you are less likely to decide to just skip it. So find a friend that you can get to join up with you to exercise with. With friends you can make exercising a competition. A friendly one of course. With setting goals together and competing to see who will reach each small goal first, you can help motivate each other to stick with it.

Also when using an exercise video to work out to, go with one that features people with less than perfect bodies. It is less discouraging when you see people who resemble you doing the workout than seeing everyone on the tape who looks perfect doing them. As corny as Richard Simmons is, his workout tapes do feature people of all shapes and sizes. I use one of his tapes a couple of times a week along with my other everyday tape. I helps me to see people who like me are less than perfect in shape and abilities. I found that when I would only workout with tapes where everyone looked perfect, after a couple of weeks they ended up just sitting on my shelf collecting dust.

With any healthy lifestyle changes that you are making, you need to keep small goals and strive to reach them. By setting long term goals, it will take longer to reach them and thus making it easier for you to give up. So keep each goal simple and easy to obtain in a short amount of time. Eventually you will be where you really want to be in the long run. Each small goal that you reach is making you a healthier person and that is truly what you are wanting.