John's Weekly Healthy Hub: Motivation

Hi everyone and welcome to John's weekly health hub! What I intend to do with this is discuss my own experiences of losing a lot of weight and also my experiences of applying this in my chosen profession as a personal trainer.

I will talk briefly about my background, I was always overweight as a child and a teenager and it wasn't a very nice experience, I lost weight twice in my life, once at 22 (which I then put back on and then some) and at age 27, thankfully this time I have kept it off. I became a personal trainer two years ago and now I run a full time business.

Where I specialise is the mindset of weight loss as this tends to be the biggest challenge. The other area that I like to help people with is the social impacts of weight loss. What I mean by this is the influences around us that dictate our beliefs and attitudes towards the subject of living a healthy lifestyle.

In this first installment, let me quickly discuss the concept of motivation and how this can be used. I have said this before and will say it again, in my opinion, I do believe it matters what gets you moving! Whether this is deemed to be a positive or negative emotion, I do not believe that it matters at the outset. I believe it does matter however if you persist with a negative emotion such as anger for example. If anger gets you going, then that for me is fine!

The second point on motivation is not to let anyone else tell you what your motivation should be, I am a firm believer in this. I am also a big believer in reading books on motivation to understand it better but I don't believe this should be decided by anyone other than you! In my opinion, and I may be wrong, if we others to TELL us what our motivation should be, it doesn't make personal.

In terms of healthy living and weight loss motivation, I feel it is important to find this out and quick. There are so many distractions that can derail our progress that I believe having a firm underlying motivation is vital to succeeding in weight loss in particular. My advice would be to sit down and really ponder what your motivation is. I believe that sometimes people fail because they feel they "have to lose weight or be healthy". The truth is, you don't! You can do whatever you want to do in life. If what are you doing isn't making you happy though, really have a think about what does make you happy and use that to fuel the motvation.

As a personal trainer, my job is to motivate and encourage people to do the best they can. One of the most important things that I do is to really discuss why my clients are choosing to go on this journey. This way I can provide positive encouragement instead of just "working their back sides off" and hoping for the best.

If you are planning to start a, exercise program or "diet" in the New Year, I would advise to have a real think about why you are doing it. I heard a quote from Jim Rohn once that said "When the why gets strong, the how gets easy" Very true indeed in my opinion!