Someone asked me the other day where he could find the motivation to lose weight. I told him that there were a number of things in life that he could use as motivation, and he just had to keep his eyes open and be aware of why he wanted to lose weight in the first place.
A few years ago, I was significantly overweight. I, too, had a difficult time finding the motivation to lose weight, because I had everything that I wanted in life a wife, children, a home and a pretty comfortable lifestyle. Then I realized that my motivation was right in front of my eyes.
My wife is not overweight and neither are my children. I was the only one who really needed to lose weight. I sitting at the dining room table one night and started thinking about an article that I had read about a man who had a heart attack that was not much older than I was at the time. He had a wife and two kids, and it all kind of hit home for me then. My family was my motivation to lose weight.
My best friend used to be overweight as well, and found out that it was getting in the way of doing his job. His employer basically told him that he needed to lose weight or he would run the risk of failing one of the physical tests that his job required. That was all the motivation he needed to lose weight, and within a year he had lost 100 pounds.
Another great motivation to lose weight is a class or family reunion. Any time that you are going to see people that once knew you as being thin, or, on the flip side, have always known you as being heavy, that is a great movitavor to drop some weight before the big day.
Being able to go shopping for clothes and knowing that you will look better can be great motivation for losing weight. Knowing that you will feeel better, period, and be much healthier, can also be a great motivation to drop a few pounds.
My aunt was having trouble climbing a long flight of stairs at work, and that was motivation enough for her to lose weight, and now she says she can run up that same flight.
The thing to remember is that losing weight is not easy, but it does not have to be hard, either. Having a motivation to lose weight always makes it much easier to do so. Generally, if you think back to when you became aware of your weight being a hinderance to you, you can use whatever that moment was as a motivator and have success getting the weight off.