Yesterday we looked at 10 fears that could be draining your weight loss motivation. If you haven’t read that post yet please do, otherwise this post might not make much sense. Besides that, yesterday’s post was meant to stir up your thoughts and help you discover whether or not you have any fears that are sapping your motivation to lose weight.

If you’re not struggling with weight loss motivation right now, I invite you to take a look at the extensive list of articles in my archives and see what strikes a chord with you today.

Now let’s look at how we can turn those first 5 fears around and use them for weight loss motivation. We’ll dissect the ones that need it, and find the way out to the positive and productive side to get you closer to your goal of weight loss and fitness.

Today I was going to list all 10 fears from yesterday’s article, turning them into motivations, but due to the length and breadth of today’s article, I decided to cover the first 5 fears today and follow up with the last 5 fears tomorrow. So let’s start with these:

• Fear of Change: Fear of change holds many people back from growing and evolving in their lives. If a fear of change is keeping you stuck and unmotivated to lose weight, here’s a solution: Get out a piece of paper and list all of the changes that you see yourself making to your lifestyle followed by the positive gains those changes will bring you. Here’s a couple of examples:

• Changing to whole foods instead of processed – more energy, clearer skin, weight loss.
• Changing your portion sizes – weight loss, taking control of your eating habits.
• Changing clothing sizes – trying out new clothing styles, looking better in what you wear.
• Changing how you move and exercise – having greater mobility and flexibility.
• Changing your schedule to accommodate cooking and exercise – feeling good about making yourself a priority.

List as many gains as you can think of and when you think you’re done, write one more. Change makes life exciting and if you want to lose weight, that unhealthy lifestyle that you’re currently leading will need to change! When you focus on all of the gains that you will receive by making healthy lifestyle changes, you will really ramp up your weight loss motivation!

• Fear of Not Being Able to Follow Through: If you fear that you won’t be able to follow through with the actions needed to reach your weight loss goals, break it down into baby steps. After you write down your long term goals break them down into monthly, weekly, and daily goals. Focus on what you need to do to prepare yourself for the week ahead (plan out all of your meals and portions), do what you need to do (cook up some healthy, whole food recipes), and then just focus on each day, one at a time. If you just stick to your meal plans each day the weight will take care of itself, providing you are following a healthy eating plan.

You can go through the same process and take baby steps with your exercise goals. After all, it’s been all of those days of, “I’ll start eating better and exercising tomorrow” that have added up and gotten you where you are today, so let’s make a change now!

• Fear of Success: If you fear success, you’ll want to get to the bottom of why you don’t feel you deserve to be thin, fit, and healthy. Affirmations and mirror work can help you increase your belief that you do deserve to succeed in your goals of weight loss and fitness, and you could start with the simple affirmation, “I deserve all good”. When you believe that you do deserve optimum health and fitness, the lid on your motivation will be lifted and you will be able to surge ahead and go for your goals.

• Fear of Giving Up Your Best Friend: I believe that this fear in one form or another is at the core of many overeating issues. What I propose is replacing the food with productive tools to replace the behavior of using food for fun, entertainment, emotions, and as a crutch. Journaling is the best tool I can suggest: journaling your emotions, those same emotions that you would ignore before and eat over instead. Another behavior change is to replace food with other activities; sounds simple but it takes action.

Now I don’t mean that you shouldn’t eat when you’re hungry, but instead of reaching for the cookie because you’re upset, go for a walk or call a friend. Professional therapy can also be a huge benefit in helping your through sort through these issues.

Moving away from abusing food needs to become a part of your life if you want to not only lose weight, but also keep it off. I know that this is not an easy task; it’s something that I’ve struggled with for most of my life, too. Also, you cannot expect that you will heal your issues with food overnight, but given time, you can let that “best friend” go and see food as what it really is: fuel for the body.

• Fear of Failure: Here’s a question you can ask yourself if you’re afraid to fail: what does it mean to fail at weight loss? Does it mean that you don’t lose weight every week, or that you give up on yourself? I think that the only way you can truly fail is if you give up and say, “to heck with it, I’m going to eat anything I want, who cares about exercise, and I’m not even going to weigh myself ever again. I’ll just buy bigger and bigger clothes!”

If you don’t give up on yourself you cannot fail. You might need to revise your game plan if you’re not getting good results and you might even backslide sometimes, but as long as you don’t throw in the towel, you cannot fail. So ask yourself this: “What happens if I fail?” Here’s the answer: You get right back up, re-commit yourself, evaluate what is working for you and what isn’t, and forge ahead. Just don’t ever quit on yourself!

Tomorrow we’ll finish up with the remaining 5 fears from the list in yesterday’s post. I hope that these posts are helping you as much as they are helping me. Remember, I’m also working on my motivation to lose weight right now, so if you are too, we’re doing this together!

Please feel free to leave a comment if you’d like to share any fears about weight loss that used to hold you back, especially if you have overcome them and now have a high level of motivation to lose weight.