What’s Your Motivation?

When I was 17, I was a highly unmotivated football player. Yet, I used football as a motivation to eat to get bigger and bigger. Finally, when football was over I really had no excuse for my weight. The days of saying, “I’m beefing up for football season” were over.

I took that motivation to eat and turned it into a more positive thinking.  It wasn’t easy. The hardest part of exercising isn’t the miles run or the weights lifted, it is motivating oneself to lift their butt off the couch. And the longer one is planted on the couch the harder it gets to be convinced to get up.

Although it can be greatly affected by exterior motives, our true motivation lies within us. We own the key to our health.

It has nothing to do with physical ability and everything to do with mental strength. We must control our thoughts in order to change our unhealthy lifestyle. We must fight the ineptitude of sitting on a couch and awaken our minds to the importance of our health.

So, what is your motivation? What will it take for you to convince yourself that you not only need to better your health but you want to? Getting motivated isn’t easy, but it is necessary to improve your physical and mental health. Setting goals is a good way to motivate yourself, but you must make your goal realistic. You may want to look like Matthew McConaughey or Jessica Biel, but it isn’t going to happen right away. Goals are things to build upon. So, keep it going one day at a time. It’s much easier to be motivated to lose 1 pound than it is if you think you have to lose 50. I just wanted to get into my size 40 pants, then my size 38, then 36, etc. Motivate yourself for one hurdle at a time and soon you’ll cross the finish line.