Many people (maybe even you) live with a daily pressure, a feeling that they need to lose weight, that they should lose weight. This pressure might seem to be coming from the outside, from media, family, friends, doctors, but it actually all comes from the inside, from your thoughts and beliefs telling yourself that you need to lose weight.

Well I was thinking about this today and I have an extremely simple solution to help you stop feeling any pressure to lose weight. While it’s a simple solution, it will take some thought but in the end you’ll either decide to act and move forward to accomplish your weight loss and fitness goals, or you will drop the whole thing.

What? You’re Telling Me to Give UP?

It might sound like I’m suggesting that you give up based on my last sentence, but here’s what I mean:

You need to determine if you’re shoulding yourself to lose weight or if you truly have the desire and the determination to lose weight (and you’ve been holding yourself back for other reasons).

Here’s what shoulding yourself to lose weight looks like:

1. You think you should lose weight because someone else told you to.
2. You think you should lose weight because celebrities and models are super skinny (that doesn’t mean they are healthy – maybe they are but maybe they aren’t).
3. You think you should lose weight to get a date.
4. You think you should lose weight to keep a relationship.
5. You think you should lose weight because of your age.

I could go on and on with this list however here’s what it all comes down to: thinking that you should lose weight creates an inner tug of war between the part of yourself that’s saying you should do this and the part of you that doesn’t want to. So, if you determine that the only reason you’ve been struggling to lose weight is because an outside influence is “telling” you that you should lose weight, then as soon as you drop that thought you’ll be amazed at the release of the struggle and the pressure you’ve been feeling!

You’ll feel an extreme release of pressure on yourself and you can get on with your life while you stop thinking the thoughts about weight loss. Does this mean that your body will be healthy, that you will be living with loads of energy, and that you’ll feel super great physically? No, I can’t say that, but you’ll sure feel a whole lot better mentally and emotionally after giving up those shoulds! The shoulds haven’t been helping you lose weight anyway, so why not just let them all go.

What If You REALLY DO Want to Lose Weight?

After you give up and get off those weight loss shoulds if you find that you have any inner desire to lose weight and get fit then you have a little more work to do. You must find your core, inner motivation that will keep you going day in and day out to achieve your weight loss and fitness goals. This drive and determination will come from the inside and when you aren’t being driven by shoulds but are completely motivated by your inner, personal reasons to get fit, then you will have much less struggle achieving your goals.

Sure, you will still need to persist and there will still be trying times but when you are truly ready and willing to change your lifestyle to get fit, get strong, and drop those excess pounds, then your inner motivation will carry you through.

Do This Today

I recommend that if you’ve been struggling with your weight for a while now that you take the time today to get out a piece of paper and write down why you think you want to lose weight – list out all of your reasons.

Go through your list and weed out all of your weight loss shoulds and see if you have any reasons of your own to get fit. If you don’t right now then at least by dropping those shoulds you’ll lighten up your mental and emotional load on yourself and you can still work on finding your inner motivation to lose weight and get fit.