Josiah Novak

Josiah Novak is an American fitness coach, author, and speaker. His articles have been featured in Fitness RX publications and he’s been a guest on MindPump and the Order of Man podcast.

Today we’re talking about how to stay motivated to lose weight. If you want the five best secrets to staying motivated while you’re losing weight then jump into this article.

Motivation is a very misunderstood topic, and I know we all want to be motivated all the time. We wanna wake up, ready to attack our goals, ready to get after it, ready to make progress every single day. And when you’re doing something like losing weight, not every day is going to feel like your best day.

You’re not gonna wake up every single morning motivated to attack your goals. In fact, I would even argue that most days you may not feel like doing the work that needs to be done. I know that there are many, many days of my life where I wake up very unmotivated. In fact, I don’t wanna do what I need to do. I would much rather lay around, watch Netflix, eat what I want, relax, and not get anything done.

So how do you fix that? Well, first of all, we have to start by understanding what is motivation. The best way I can describe motivation is this: motivation is simply an emotional state. It’s like anger, or excitement, or adrenaline rush, or happiness, like over the top happiness, right, where it’s something that doesn’t last forever. You know, if you’re frustrated, at some point you’re gonna get over that frustration. Sometimes you’re going to feel extremely motivated. You might see a picture that gets you motivated. You might watch a video, or a movie, or you’ll hear something, or sometimes you look in the mirror and go, whoa, I don’t like what I see. I need to get my butt in gear. I know a common way that people get motivated is they set a deadline, or they have an event coming up where they want to look and feel their best. Especially when it comes to weight loss, having something to shoot for, a target, can be very motivating for some people. But understanding that motivation is simply an emotional state will help you realize that you’re not always going to be motivated.

Tip number two is understanding that when you don’t go after your goals and you don’t level up, you don’t lose weight, you know, stop worrying about impressing other people. Stop worrying about letting other people down. Understand you are letting yourself down more than anything else.

Let’s jump into my number one hack to get quickly off the couch, up and at it, and tackle whatever you’re not feeling motivated to do. I call it the 10 minute rule. What does the 10 minute rule do? I’ll put it to you like this, the 10 minute rule is literally 10 minutes. That’s what we’re gonna utilize to get motivated. We’re gonna utilize a small chunk of time to do whatever it is that you don’t feel like doing instead of thinking about the whole big picture, the whole pie that you’re trying to accomplish. Let’s give working out as an example. You have a hour workout plan for your day. You wake up, you’re not motivated. Well, do you sit there and go, man, I really don’t wanna go work out for an hour? No, of course not, ’cause the more you think about that hour, the more it’s gonna seem daunting and just impossible, ’cause you don’t have the energy, you don’t have the motivation.

So here’s what the 10 minute rule does. You just commit to doing 10 minutes of that thing, 10 minutes, that’s it. Anybody can do basically anything for 10 minutes. So you go work out for 10 minutes. You commit to that small chunk of time. And then after 10 minutes is done, you check in with yourself. If you feel like continuing on and finishing the workout, then keep going, go crush the whole thing. If you don’t, if you’re like, man, I feel even worse. I’m not ready for this workout, I can’t do it. Well, the good news is you have my permission to stop, go home, recharge, and come back the next day. Why? ‘Cause you committed to 10 minutes, you did it, you knocked out the commitment that you had made with yourself. That leads to more self-belief, which leads to more motivation because you understand you can do this. You’re more than capable, right? But here’s what’s gonna happen 99% of the time, I can guarantee it. You’ll do 10 minutes and go that wasn’t too bad. I can totally do the whole thing, or at least more than 10 minutes, it might be 20 minutes, 30, or maybe it is the whole workout.