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Staying
Motivated in the Face of Little or No Progress
By Eugene Thong, CSCS
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 It’s
the dreaded moment all of us on the
road to the body of our dreams face.
You
step on the scale (or, if you’re lucky, climb inside the DEXA machine)
and – BOOM – no weight lost. Disaster! And you were so good
last week!
How can
you keep your spirits high when you’re not shedding the inches?
Understand this: When lack of progress gets you down, you stop thinking
rationally – instead, you think emotionally. You will have an
impaired ability to dissect your performance and to take an impartial
look at the actions that are truly defeating you.
You
won’t have the ability to stand back and say, “Hmmm, I’ve stopped
losing
fat, it might be the bag of pretzels I’m eating at night while watching
Survivorman on TV”, or , “Ok, I have to get serious and stop
having that glass of wine with my nightly meal”, or even “You know,
maybe if I
added some more fat into my diet, I’d have a little more
energy for my workouts, continue losing fat, and wouldn’t feel so wiped
out all the time!”
Instead, your mind thinks, “I’ve been so good all day, I ate a salad and
everything!”, “I
drank all my water today!”, or “I even lifted a little
heavier because Mike wrote in
Black Book of Secrets
that lifting heavier will help me burn more calories in the long run!”
Your
mind will tend to focus on the things that you are doing right, but
conveniently forget about the negative behaviors that you engage in that
sabotage your efforts.
Quick –
think about what you had for breakfast two days ago.
Chances
are, if you’ve been following our advice and doing what you should be,
you’ll know the answer right away.
“Well,
Eugene, that’s easy; I had a bowl of Kashi with blueberries and 2% milk
and a couple of eggs.”
(Errrr….well,
bully for you that you remembered. But FYI, drop the Kashi, ‘k?
Thanks.)
However, if you’ve not been
executing your fat loss plan with full
success (or worse, “winging it”), your answer may be dramatically
different.
“Umm, I
think I had a yogurt, or something. Maybe a banana?”
“I had
a cup of coffee, but I didn’t put any sugars in it. Then I had…another
cup of coffee.”
Then
there’s my favorite one: “Errr….breakfast?”
If
you’re like most people (myself included), you’ll remember only the
75-90% you did right, and forget about the 10-25% you did wrong. 10% is
a LOT – and it can mean the difference between meeting your goals and
not even coming close (or even gaining weight for your efforts).
This is
why most people enlist the services of a good coach or a
qualified trainer, by the way. You’re simply too close to yourself; you
have too much invested in your success (or more likely, avoiding
potential failure) that you simply can’t take a non-emotional look at
your behaviors.
You
(just like the top 1% of athletes, bodybuilders, and fitness models)
need a detached professional to help keep you on the up and up.
Back to
the matter at hand.
Let’s
examine two common emotional demotivators and see how we can turn them
around.
Goal-setting:
As
you’ve read about in
Mike’s article on long term
weight loss success, goal-setting is probably the most important factor
in achieving your fat loss goals; at least initially.
Whether
you set goals explicitly, like we recommend you do (put pen to paper and
write them down) or implicitly (by imagining or thinking about your
goals), setting unrealistic or outlandish goals is the first pitfall on
your road to success.
What
happens when you don’t hit your goals? You get disappointed, start to
think that the effort isn’t worth it, wonder if you’re indeed following
the right program, and get demotivated! Not a great way to ensure you
continually lose the pounds.
Here are
three things you can do in order to maximize your morale, right from the
get-go:
1) Make your goals
specific.
No more of this “I want to get skinny” or “I want to get ripped this
summer” crap. Set specific, quantifiable numbers to it:
I want to lose
10 pounds, by XYZ. Give yourself a deadline, otherwise you’ll just be
lackadaisical about it and never get around to doing it. Setting a
deadline will fire you up to accomplish your goals.
2) Not shooting
high enough.
Let’s face it, everyone: “I want to lose 2 pounds” is
NOT a motivating goal. You want to lose two pounds? Go stand outside
for a few hours without drinking any water – Voila. Your goals must be
realistic but challenging.
A more compelling
goals would be “I want to lose 20 pounds (or 23.75 pounds) by my next
quarterly meeting (in 6 weeks).” Having a challenging goal is extremely
motivating, since you’re holding yourself up to a higher standard.
3) Setting
unrealistic or inappropriate goals.
While bigger and bolder goals do inspire you to higher levels of
performance, an unreachable goal is a fairy tale that, deep down, you
don’t really believe (and will never achieve). If your subconscious
mind doesn’t believe that you can lose 60 pounds and have 6% body fat by
next summer, then you won’t achieve it.
Proper goal setting is
the programming of your subconscious mind to give you what it is you
want. Nip the problem of unrealistic goal setting in the bud by doing
it right in the first place. A good rule of thumb is 1-2 pounds of fat
lost per week – research has shown this to be a safe, reasonable, and
realistic expectation.
Effort-performance linkage:
What
this highfalutin’ term really means is simple: the harder you work, you
the better the reward you expect. For example, you’d expect that if you
work longer hours, you’ll get paid more. Well, for the vast majority of
people the world, this is true – the more hours you put in at the
office, the more you take home.
 However,
if you were to put in 60 hour weeks instead of 40 hour weeks, and your
take home pay remained the same, well, you’d probably not end up
maintaining that output very long. Why? Because the effort you
expended didn’t equal the reward.
Failures of effect-performance linkage cause so many people to drop off
of weight loss programs, it isn’t even funny. How many people do you
know (or have you yourself) stopped the weight loss program they were on
because, “it was too hard, took too much discipline and sacrifice, and I
even ended up gaining weight!”
(Chances are they weren’t following any of the suggestions we make in
Black Book of Secrets,
but that’s another story altogether.)
How can
we guard against failures in effort-performance linkage?
Realize that not
losing weight is not FAILURE, but a sign that one of your behaviors
isn’t working.
In other words, before you react emotionally and start the negative
cascade (“Ah this dieting crap never works for me, I’m doomed, etc.”)
interrupt your pattern with a trigger word – such as “focus” –
which should bring your mind back to reality and stop the emotional
cascade.
If you are
paying proper attention to your nutrition, have confidence that
everything should work out as it should (i.e., you lose weight, become
more defined, etc.) . If you do hit a momentary hitch in the road, use
the trigger word strategy to enable you to examine your strategies
rationally.
Reward yourself,
productively.
Instead of linking your success and esteem on external
things that you may not be able to control, such as the rate of your fat
loss (which is really up to your body to decide, as tough as that may be
to accept), link it to internal factors that you have complete and total
control over, such as your food selection (give yourself kudos for
eating 90% of your meals as clean,
high-quality foods) or junk avoidance
(congratulate yourself every time you overcome the urge to have a
chocolate, or a processed carb, or a soda, or whatever your trigger food
is).
By rewarding proper
behaviors, instead of rewarding outcomes, you stack the deck
in your favor.
Avoid assessing
progress too frequently.
It may be that the time frame you choose to assess yourself in is too
small. If you’re one of those people that weighs themselves everyday,
prepare for a ton of disappointments. Like a day trader in the stock
market, your emotions will be taken for a daily roller coaster ride with
each up or downtick of the scale.
It would be more
fruitful for you to choose a longer interval (such as a week),
eliminating the volatility of the day-to-day. Focusing on the overall
trends rather than every small change will have an equalizing effect on
your mood and will be helpful in maintaining your motivation.
In fat
loss terms, when the going gets tough, most people resort to their old
habits. You’ve got to break this vicious cycle if you’re to be
successful in the fat loss game. Use the strategies outlined here to
help keep up your motivation in the face of adversity and keep that fat
loss fire burning!
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About the Author:
Eugene Thong, CSCS, was born a weak, skinny,
bespectacled child. Now, thanks to a steady diet of martial arts, scientific
inquiry, and heavy compound movements, he's no longer weak. His scientific
bent, Zen-like demeanor, and efficient but intense methods have made him one
of New York's most sought-after personal trainers.
 When
not helping clients cultivate their own inner 6-packs, Eugene can be found
arm barring opponents at Renzo Gracie's Brazilian Jiu-Jitsu Academy or
sailing through the air on his snowboard. Read Eugene's semi-weekly musings
on exercise, fitness, and fat loss
at his blog
Eugene is Mike's co-author of The Black Book of Secrets. You can purchase
it by clicking
here.
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