How to Motivate Yourself for a Healthier Life

Living a healthier life is something that most people aspire to, but it’s not always easy to stay motivated. A new report has shown that only about 23 percent of Americans get enough exercise to stay healthy.

This is an alarming rate, but there are many reasons why it can be hard to stick with a healthy routine, one of the biggest challenges is often finding the motivation to get started. Once you do get started, however, it becomes easier to keep going.

Today we are going to discuss some ways that you can get and stay motivated for living a healthier and happier life. Let’s take a look!

Formulate Your Own Goals

Exercise is popularly viewed as an integral part of a healthy lifestyle, but it is only one piece. Diet plays just as important of a role in good health, so you should also be concentrating on what types of food you are putting into your body.

The first step to living more healthily is coming up with personal goals for both areas. Make them realistic and achievable so that they will work within any schedule changes or life events that may come up. 

When you come up with small achievable goals, you’ll feel like you can accomplish them. The key here is to start by making them small enough so that you know you can achieve them. If you make them too big or out of realistic reach, you won’t have any motivation to try. 

Once you have that down, it can even help you in other areas of your life. If you start accomplishing your set goals for being healthier, you’ll see how setting goals can be applied to the rest of your life. Whether you want to build a stronger relationship, grow your small business, or learning to play an instrument, setting small achievable goals will help you!

Understand the Benefits of Exercise

When people begin their journey toward better physical fitness, motivation can often come from basic desires like looking better or feeling healthier. If this is your main drive for improvement, then make sure to understand how exercise can lead to these benefits.

For example, knowing that exercise will help you build muscle tissue and improve your cardiovascular system is a great way to stay enthusiastic about your workouts. Make a mental checklist of all the positive effects you can expect from a more active lifestyle and remind yourself of them when motivation starts to waver.

Having regular exercise has so many benefits to your overall health. It can reduce stress, improve happiness and sex, as well as help, prevent erectile dysfunction and heart diseases.

Or write them down so that you can look at them every day. 

Take Progress Photos

One of the most difficult parts of improving one’s appearance is seeing the changes in person instead of on paper. There are many similarities between how we look at others and how we see ourselves, which means it is often hard to be objective with our health-related goals.

Many people who set out for slimmer waistlines or more toned muscles have trouble visualizing what they want to look like. By taking photos of yourself before you start working out and checking back in periodically, you can get an idea of your own progress.

You can take photos at key milestones or set up a point system using your calendar to track how often you’re hitting the gym. Seeing small positive changes every few weeks is one of the best ways to stay motivated for permanent lifestyle changes.

Motivate Yourself with Rewards

When people talk about motivation, they are usually referring to pushing past difficult emotions that might be holding them back from accomplishing their goals. If this sounds familiar, then it might be time to introduce some self-motivation methods into your life.

Another way to do this is by rewarding yourself for reaching certain milestones or goals. The right rewards will depend on what you are trying to accomplish, but it can be anything from buying yourself a small present to taking the day off work so that you have more time to exercise or cook healthy food.

And don’t feel bad about taking a day off of work for your physical and mental health. Those are much more important than your job. 

When people feel valued and appreciated for their efforts, they are much more motivated to keep going. Be sure to take note of your progress at set point intervals in order to reward yourself appropriately.

Be Accountable with a Partner

If staying motivated for sticking to an exercise routine or diet program seems nearly impossible, then there is yet another approach you can take: using other people as accountability partners. Having someone else who is also improving themselves alongside you will make it easier for both parties involved.

Spending time with other people who are trying to improve their health and fitness levels is an excellent way to keep your motivation high because there will always be someone around you to push you toward better habits. Plus, working together with a friend or family member makes it even easier for you to stay on track with whatever schedule changes come up in your routines.

This is best when it is done with your partner, but anyone can do it with you!

Make Fitness Fun

One of the problems that many people face when starting out with a healthier lifestyle is boredom. People get stuck in ruts where they do the same things over and over again until they finally get sick of exercising (or eating) and give up completely.

To avoid this, try adding some variety or new gym workouts and nutrition plans whenever possible. If jogging has grown stale, then try going for a swim or going to a yoga class instead. If you’ve been eating the same three vegetables for dinner every night, then try mixing them up with some new recipes.

Reinvigorate your daily routines by making a point of trying out new things on a regular basis. Even if you don’t enjoy those activities as much as your old ones, simply changing yourself from feeling bored about exercise will be enough to motivate you in staying active and healthy.

Think About Your Personal Life & Relationships

If you are having trouble sticking to your regular fitness routines, then it might be time to give some thought to how that is affecting other aspects of your life.

One of the best ways to start changing your current habits is by thinking about why they may need to change in the first place. Getting healthy should take precedence over almost all other things because it directly affects your state of mind and relationships with others.

After all, your physical and mental health should be a priority in your life over everything else. 

Think About How You’ll Grow & Become More Productive

When you are actively doing things to be healthy, it’ll improve your overall mindset, happiness, and self-confidence. Likewise, the complete opposite can happen when you aren’t active.

If you make the effort to start choosing a healthier lifestyle, it’ll improve your mindset and you’ll continue to grow from that.

You’ll also learn to be more productive. And when we say more productive, that could mean everything in your life. When you feel good, you start doing things that will help you grow in other areas of your life.

Whether you want to learn how more about online learning, how to become a better boss, or build a stronger relationship, being actively healthy is going to help ensure you are in the right mindset.

Start Small & Don’t Overwhelm Yourself

Making small changes over time is the best way to ensure that you stick to your new health and fitness routine. It can be tough to suddenly overhaul your lifestyle, so start by making a few simple changes and then gradually add more as you become more comfortable with them.

For example, start by giving up soft drinks and then move on to more sugary snacks such as candy bars or ice cream (which is surprisingly high in calories for something that tastes so good). Once you’re used to those changes, think about making some others such as cutting down on carbs, sugars, and fried foods.

Don’t try to do everything at once because it’s going to overwhelm your body and mind. Instead, give yourself a timeline of a few weeks or even months to get used to the small changes before going forward with more drastic ones.

Eventually, you’ll have made so many changes that eating healthy will become second nature!

Start Simple and Become Healthy and Happier

Now that you’ve learned about some of the best ways to motivate yourself, it is time for you to put those tactics into practice. The key point we want to emphasize in this blog post is that motivation doesn’t just happen. It must be generated and maintained by making a conscious effort every day.

We hope these tips will help guide your journey towards self-improvement and success!

Make sure to check out the rest of this health blog for some more awesome tips like these!

About The Guest Author –

social benge: Founder – Ethan Benge

 Ethan Benge

Many times small businesses are overcharged for services they have little to no experience in, such as SEO services, web design, and social media management. Social benge offers digital marketing services for small businesses at an affordable rate.


Related Articles

Leave a Comment