What is the weight-loss motivation? What does it take to keep moving forward toward your goals without giving up? When you're ready to give up, how do you keep going? Remind yourselves that you are trying to create a new habit. You are moving towards any type of change, moving towards health and weight loss goals. It is a process, it is a practice, and it takes time. It is supposed to take time and quitting does not speed that process up. We are often fed so many false ideas to achieve a goal in 30 days or get a six pack in two weeks. That moment we feel like the process is not going fast enough . We use that as a reason to stop moving towards our goal. If somebody who hops on and off different diet programs or finds himself blaming the program or blaming certain types of food or blaming things outside of him for his inability to continue moving forward on his path ,He may be in the habit of quitting . Whenever you are moving towards a goal so you have a weight loss goal and you begin to practice new habits, moving in the direction of that goal, there will be moments of discomfort. There will be moments of challenge. Some of those moments just come from your thoughts. It just comes from an idea that it's not working ,or you don't know if you are gonna get anywhere or you don't know if this is actually going to be successful , whatever it is anything that presents some type of discomfort .Eventually if we are feeling like that long enough going to the option of quitting ,offers us a temporary feeling of relief. When something feels really hard and then we give ourself permission to quit, for the moment it feels better, it offers us a false sense of pleasure. Because in that moment we are experiencing relief from the discomfort of moving towards the goal or discomfort of changing our habits, so it's understandable .Quitting provides some relief, but if we quit every time ,something is difficult or the road becomes bumpy. We will become really adept at quitting because we become what we practise.The only way to really get stronger ,the only way to get better at something, to improve upon something, is to fall and have to push your way back up right is to stumble, learn ,adjust ,and move forward. Think about a baby walking or a baby crawling,they get stronger by pushing themselves back up all the time and they fall down and they push up. Think about going to the gym. You get stronger by breaking down your muscles, resting and then coming back and doing it again . If you use a challenge or if you use a confusion as a reason to stop, as a reason to quit ,you are just gonna get really good at quitting and then getting a remotivated and starting from the beginning and then hitting a bump and then quitting again, versus deciding what you are going to do, committing to it letting it feel hard and bumpy and using that as a reason to figure out .What has to happen next and sometimes nothing has to happen next . We just have to stay the course. If you look away or if you quit every time something feels hard or every time we feel a little bit stuck in the process, then you never learn how to overcome that part of yourself and never learn how to expand into more of who you are, which honestly is really what any and all goals are about including your weight-loss goals . It is about understanding yourself on a deeper level. It is about understanding your needs and your wants and your desires and figuring out how to build a formula that works for you to help you achieve those goals. It is an invitation of growth. It is an invitation of expansion, and when you think about it like that ,then you can allow yourself to just let it be a little bit messy .Allow yourself to let it be imperfect and allow it to maybe even feel uncomfortable, or even hard at times without using that as a reason to stop Now there's two main reasons why stop moving towards our goals. Two main reasons why we quit ? First one is that we don't make a commitment to ourselves. We don't commit to the process and the minute something feels hard or confusing or unclear we use it as a reason to quit ,so commitment is a big one . You want to commit to your goal .The second is, we don't believe that we can achieve the goal that we are setting out to commit. We don't believe that we are able to lose weight. We don't believe that we are capable of actually doing it because we are constantly looking to our past for evidence .What we must remember is not what we did in the past, but what we are doing right now.In order to achieve the weight loss goal that is in front of us we have to figure it out. We have to be willing to put the pieces together , but of course we are capable ,of course we are all able ,and we tell ourselves we are not and we choose not to believe in ourselves. It simply provides us with a compelling excuse to give up that is not founded in reality. It isn't based on reality, so how do we achieve our health and weight-loss goals without giving up? Some really tangible steps that can help : 1. Don't change the goal, change the timeline. If your goal is to lose 50 pounds and you are thinking that it is not working and it is not happening fast enough and then you are using that as a reason to say, this is not working and I'm not going to do it anymore and I'm going to quit. keep the goal , extend the timeline . I am going to give myself 2 years to figure out how to lose 50 pounds.Would you not want to continue on your trip if you knew you'd attain your objective in two years? So often we give ourselves unrealistic time frames to reach our goals that it offers a really quick and easy way for us to quit ,because it feels overwhelming ,so there's a lot of negative emotion and we don't believe in ourselves, so don't change the goal but give yourself more time to achieve your goal. 2.The second tip is to trade criticism , curiosity when we get very critical of ourselves , when we are really hard on ourselves ,we lose access to understanding ourselves ,to seeing what's going on with ourselves .So encourage criticism for curiosity . Be so curious about yourself because everything we do, we do for good reasons and if we find ourself having a hard time, creating a new habit of getting hung up on an old habit ,there is some nugget of wisdom in there for us .There are some type of message for us .There's something we are supposed to be learning in that space .Don't use that as a reason to tell ourselves we can't do this and this is too hard for us and we are not capable. All of that is not true. Just stop that conversation ,there's no fact in that statement .Of course we are capable ,we just have to create more space for ourselves, so be curious with yourself and ask yourself what is the message here? What is this behaviour teaching me? What do I have to learn here ? and that will open up a whole new world of information for you 3. It is a practice being as kind and compassionate to yourself as you humanly can. Here's the deal, being human is tricky. It is messy sometimes, when we are trying to create change, when we are trying to do something different, sometimes it's going to feel hard and sometimes it's going to feel uncomfortable. Don't use that as a reason to beat yourself up.Be so gentle with yourself ,be tender, be easy because that is going to help move you forward. If self-criticism worked, if beating yourself up if being mean to yourself worked we all would probably be already at our weight-loss goals. We would have well achieved them .By now, if for no other reason to practice being kind to yourself, just know it is the only pathway to change that you are trying to create. 4.The fourth step to help you to continue to move towards your health and weight loss goals without quitting ,is when you need to take a break. Sometimes it does get tricky ,sometimes it gets overwhelming, sometimes it feels hard. Maybe it's hard because of what we are actually doing. Sometimes it is hard just because of what we are telling ourselves. We are human. It's not supposed to be a perfect linear journey but taking a little bit of a break . Giving yourself a little bit of reprieve is so much more effective than just quitting on yourself .Every time we quit, we allow ourselves to get ready confused because we think we can't figure something out .While the truth is of course we can figure it out, we just have to be willing to stick around when it feels mucky . We have to be willing to stick around when it doesn't seem super clear, or when things don't seem like they are moving in a perfectly linear direction .So just allow yourself to take a break when you need to step back , then continue to move forward that goes back to the whole concept that there is no wagon. We don't get off the wagon and back on the wagon. Everything is momentum forward as long as you don't quit. The only way you can fail is, if you quit, so the next time you decide to commit to something, commit to it and then if you become challenged if you feel yourself having a desire to stop and you feel the desired to quit, step back and review these four tips and ask yourself ,can I go slower ? Can I give myself more time? Can I be a little bit more curious with myself? What do I have to learn here?Can I find a way to be kinder , more compassionate ,more gentle with myself as I figured this out? Do I need to take a break? Do I need to just take a break for a couple of days and then revisit this with a clear mind? Let's see if that creates a different outcome.