Fasting has many, many benefits. But sometimes even knowing all the benefits of a healthy lifestyle doesn't mean that you'll be able to stay motivated all the time to adhere to that lifestyle. Following are some different techniques you can use to get and stay motivated.
You don't have to stick with just one of these motivational tactics. In fact, if you employ a combination of any of them, you can increase your chances of success. Figure out which ones work best for you and practice them.
Find a fasting accountabili-buddy.
Research has shown that enlisting a friend, or an accountabili-buddy, to join you in a healthy lifestyle overhaul will set you up for greater success. You’ll lose more weight, and you’ll stick with the program longer than if you had gone it alone.
Given today’s widely connected world, the friend that you pick doesn’t have to be local. Maybe a Facebook friend who lives across the country wants to join you in your lifestyle change or perhaps you want to join an online forum or community.
Read articles/blogs or watch videos.
Sometimes all you need to get or stay motivated is to watch or read something that inspires you. Reading a blog or various articles or watching a video clip about someone else’s successful body and lifestyle transformations can be very powerful and go a long way in making you feel up to the task of sticking with your new healthy lifestyle.
Set a short-term goal with a reward.
Choose a goal that you can measure and attain in a relatively short amount of time, and after you reach that goal, reward yourself with something that isn’t related to junk food, such as a massage or the purchase of new workout clothes.
If you make food your ultimate reward, then you’ll constantly feel like you’re depriving yourself when you aren’t eating those rewarding foods. Instead, choose a reward that is meaningful to you but that doesn’t involve sabotaging the progress you’ve made.
Recognize that sometimes you need a carrot and sometimes you need a stick.
Rewarding yourself may not do the trick to keep motivated quite as well as if you “punished” yourself for not completing a goal.
Leading a healthy lifestyle means that eating well, fasting, exercising appropriately, and so on aren’t punishments. You may have spent years already thinking they are, and you actually need to completely reverse that way of thinking.
When you need a motivational boost, close your eyes and imagine what your life will look like in the future — three, six, or 12 months or longer from now — if you were to quit today.
Make sure you’re honest with yourself. Think about how you felt and looked before you began your healthy lifestyle journey and the positive changes you’ve made so far, and then create questions and scenarios around those things.
This motivational tactic forces you to take stock of the life you lived prior to deciding to get healthy and how much worse you would feel if you continued along that unhealthy path. That future can be a very scary place, but the beautiful thing about your future is that it hasn’t been decided yet.
Visualize your healthy future.
You can use visualization to imagine and picture what your healthy future will look like, if you continue to adhere to your current healthy lifestyle overhaul. With visualization, you recreate all the images, feelings, and even sounds of a particular event; however, you allow only for a positive outcome, doing away with any negative feelings or thoughts that would normally inhibit your success.
Focus on the positive feelings.
Confident, balanced, energetic, alive. Have you experienced any of these positive feelings since you first tried fasting? If you’re looking for motivation, focus on a time when you began your journey toward health and remember when you felt good, really good, about your new lifestyle.
Maybe it was after successfully completing a fast or turning down dessert or upon receiving a compliment about your glowing skin or waking up truly rested for the first time in years. You felt great, knowing that you successfully completed a daylong fast.
Take stock of the positive changes you've experienced.
Because you’re in the thick of making progress, you may not be able to see the progress you’ve already made. If so, spend some time taking stock of the positive changes you’ve experienced since you committed to a fasting method, rather than looking at the progress you haven’t made (yet).
Notice how much better your clothes fit. Think about how well you’ve been sleeping lately.
Be compassionate with yourself.
Sometimes you just aren’t going to feel motivated and you aren’t going to have as successful a day or week as you would have liked. Employing negative self-talk and getting down on yourself because you didn’t meet your own expectations won’t help you in the long-run. When you encounter the rough times, the best thing you can do is be compassionate with yourself.
Get in the habit of motivating yourself.
Motivation is a habit, and like all habits, if you want it to become second nature, you must practice it. And practice it on a regular basis.
Set aside 15 to 20 minutes a day to think about your goals, your progress, where you see yourself now, and where you want to be. Find positive affirmations that are meaningful to you and recite them — in your mind, in the car, or in front of a mirror.