Believe It!

It's tough to get motivated to start a new diet. I worked toward motivating myself to lose weight for seven or eight years (I'm not kidding). It wasn't until I started believing that it could really happen that I got ready to move forward. Getting my IBS under more control with low FODMAPs really helped me see that changing my diet could change my body.

I decided to find an old picture of myself and put it in a place where I would see it frequently to get me started. I think this could work using a picture of someone you would like to look like one day. In my case I have pictures of how I used to look that showed how I wanted to look again.

I chose a picture from when I was 18. I knew I wouldn't look 18 again, but figured my body could look similar... after all it was MY body.

So I posted this picture onto the screen saver on my smart phone. Every single time I pushed my phone on I was confronted with this picture-- that's a lot of motivation!

Next I made a catch phrase for myself that I used like a mantra. It seems rather silly when I say it out loud or type it, but never-the-less, I said to myself (often), "I want to be a tiny little mother".  You know... those tiny little old ladies that are so cute people say "Awwww, I want to be like her someday", whenever she leaves the room.

When I look back on this time, this is the only difference between my success this time and my many failures or temporary successes of the past. I imagined, I visualized, I believed.