To look at it from the other direction, which is the one that gnaws and nags at the back of my mind, is when I’m feeling negative about myself physically; it definitely weighs on me mentally.
One way to see a purpose in your exercise and perhaps healthy eating habits is to set goals.
Setting goals is important for this and for many aspects of your life.
If you wake up each morning without some goal, any goal, your whole day, week will be rudderless.
It is significant to set a couple of different types of goals.
Ideally you’d want at least a short term, an intermediate, and a long term goal.
If you set only a short term one, you’ll achieve it quickly and be left without a new direction unless you set another.
If you only have a long term goal you might become discouraged and stop when you feel like it’s taking too long to see your results.
Set your first one that you feel you could realistically obtain in the next week or two, and then set an intermediate one that you could make in like 2-6 months.
Perhaps revisit your goals every week and revise as needed, especially the short term one as you cross them off your list.
I have been doing it for about five years and I still put one or two goals on 3X5 index cards and tape them to my bathroom mirror.
I have known people to place their goals opposite their bed on the wall that they face when they roll out of bed, they are the first things they see each day.
From short term to long term, might be: to shave 30 seconds off your run time by the end of next week, then to run at least 4x every week for the next eight weeks, and then to finish a 10k by the end of spring.
Some people keep logs, others scratch their notes on those goal cards.
Set little achievement goals to obtain so that when you are recording your progress you feel like you have accomplished something big.
If you feel like you just don’t have time today for cardiovascular work, ask yourself if you had, or have, time for Facebook? What about television? Or remind yourself how much better and full of life you’ll feel immediately after working out.
Don’t you almost always feel better and more confident about yourself after exercise? I know I do.
Why then would you workout in order to prolong something you dislike? No, exercise isn’t happy, fun joke around time but if you are able to imagine the results you’ll see in a couple of days or imagine how you’ll feel to cross off one of those goals that should make it enjoyable.
If you set up your time to always have certain days off, again you have a goal to press towards.
Making exercise enjoyable, setting both readily achievable and harder to get goals, and establishing a schedule are all great ways to find or restore your motivation.
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