This post is about how to make weight loss enjoyable. It’s essentially a written version of an episode from my podcast, which you can find here:
Interestingly, when we think about losing weight, not many people think about that process being enjoyable.
It’s so easy to think “I’ll feel good WHEN I get to the goal”
“When I see that number on the scales change”
We can easily end up believing the whole process leading up to reaching that weight loss goal is just a hard slog, where we’re missing out on ‘having ‘fun’.
The trouble is that this doesn’t tend to lead to results, because its not fun or motivating to stick to.
It leads to not enjoying the process. Feeling like the goal is reeeeally far away.
Losing motivation.
Thinking ‘why bother’.
Getting frustrated at lack of progress on the scales, because seeing the scales drop is the only joy we allow ourselves along the way.
Self sabotaging.
And ultimately, staying stuck.
So what do we need to do to change this?
Focus on enjoying the process – don’t wait for the outcome
Hopefully, if your goal is to lose weight, one of fundamental reasons for doing it is to enhance your life.
Getting fitter, healthier, and into a size where you feel happiest makes your life more enjoyable. So you can do the things you want to do and feel at your best.
We tend to think that happiness and fulfillment only comes from the outcome of getting to the goal.
But the reality (if we want sustainable results) is that it needs to come from the process itself.
We know we need to eat better, or less (or both), and exercise more. And those healthy habits can easily be associated with feeling boring, restrictive, like hard work, and choices that don’t make us happy.
But something that’s not spoken about anywhere near enough is just how great those habits – eating nutritious food and doing exercise – can make you feel – pretty much straight away.
SO many times, my online coaching clients have told me how much better they’ve felt for a day or two of eating better after a holiday or a bit of time off track.
Or they’ve messaged me when they’ve done a long walk or workout, feeling happy and proud of themselves and enjoying that boost of endorphins.
But we forget that so easily when we’re tired, stressed or struggling in the early days of building new habits.
Habits beat motivation
People who lose weight and keep if off – who get fit, healthy, strong, and wear clothes they feel confident in – build great habits and enjoy what they do.
That doesn’t mean they love every minute, and always feel motivated to eat well and go to the gym. In fact, many times they still don’t feel motivated.
Healthy people still crave, and sometimes eat, chocolate or junk food.
They sometimes overeat.
And most of them have plenty of times when they don’t want to workout.
To overcome that loss of motivation, they focus on how good it makes them feel, and do it anyway. Partly because it’s a habit (which we can all build).
In general, healthy people make great choices that align with their goals, consistently, not perfectly.
What does weight loss mean to you?
So if your goal is weight loss, and if you’re like the clients I work with…
Your goal also involves being fit, healthy, and strong enough to do all the things you want to do in life…
Still traveling, playing with kids and grandkids…
Going on adventures, being fully independent in your 70s, 80s, even 90s…
Quality nutrition and regular exercise are going to be key to that.
So focus on how good they make you feel.
Not ‘good’ as in ‘virtuous’. Good as in energised, nourished, lighter, stronger, proud of what your body can do.
Our brains tend to focus on how delicious junk food can be in the very short space of time that we’re eating it, and forget how rubbish it can make us feel after.
To counter this, notice how great good food choices can make you feel.
When we eat more natural foods, protein, fruits and vegetables,you might notice how much more energy you have. How you feel lighter, less bloated. You might sleep better. And you dont get the sluggish / sugar rush / energy-slump feeling that comes from eating or overeating processed foods.
If you go off track and you have that horrible bloated sluggish lethargic feeling, literally one day (sometimes even one meal) that’s more nutritious, can make you feel so much better.
Our bodies are designed to thrive on natural foods. So unless you have a particular condition where your body doesn’t tolerate certain choices, you will ALWAYS feel better when you eat natural foods. Protein, fruit, veg, healthy fats, things you find in nature.
And it doesn’t take long for the body to respond when we give it great nutrition.
How to Enjoy Exercise
Our bodies are also designed to move.
Most of us have experience many times not wanting to move. But have you ever regretted going for a walk or doing a workout?
I doubt it.
So we need to remember the feeling we get from it, and how it is a gift to go and do.
We haven’t GOT to move our body, we GET to.
And then we get to experience the great feeling after.
That can be pride, satisfaction, joints feeling better. Muscles feeling stronger and more toned, sleeping better. Even when low on energy to start with, we often gain energy from working out.
As a bit of a side note – If you feel wiped out after exercise, you’re going too hard.
This can happen at any age, but particularly when we get to our 40s and 50s. We think we need to do intense hardcore classes like we did in our 20s and 30s. Or we have a personal trainer that pushes us really hard, because we (and maybe they) associate that with a good workout.
But if you’re nearly sick, shattered later and can barely sit on the toilet for days after, you’ve done more than was optimal, and you’d get a lot more benefit from reducing the volume or the intensity.
We do want to lift heavy, and it is good to do some higher intensity work like interval training. But it has to be done at the right level for where our body is at. Often as we get older, that means more rest between sets and shorter sessions. That means you can recover better, be more consistent, and get far better results in the long term.
How to Improve Motivation and Mindset
Do you struggle with that negative self-critical inner voice?
Something that can help a lot with this is to change unhelpful statements or questions into helpful questions.
For example, a common sabotaging thought is ‘I’ll never get there anyway’.
This thought saps motivation and leads to making choices that impact your progress. So you don’t get there (‘there’ being your goal in the time frame you were hoping for), and then it becomes a self fulfilling prophecy.
This thought could be changed to something like:
‘Lets just see what happens if I refuse to give up. Whats one great choice I can make today that will make me feel good?’
And that gets your brain focused on a positive action step instead.
Another very common sabotaging thought is ‘What’s the point?’.
This is a question, so its a good one to answer – what IS the point?
The point could be to…
- Have more energy.
- Be as healthy as i can be for my family.
- Feel confident in my clothes.
- Be a role model for my kids.
- Reduce my risk of various diseases.
- Be fit and active in my old age.
- Know I’ve given myself the best chance of a long, healthy life.
- Feel at my best throughout life and not miss out because I don’t feel healthy, fit or confident enough
When you’ve written down your reasons why – the ones that resonate with you – and you can refer back to them and read them when your brain asks whats the point… It’s much easier to remember that there is a point (a very big point, or many points), and to keep going.
Saying No to the Extras means saying Yes to Your Goals
One other common thought is along the lines of:
‘You may as well just eat, drink and enjoy yourself – YOLO!’
Which our brains, or other people, use to get us to indulge.
And of course, we DO want to enjoy ourselves. And as far as we know it is true that we only live once. But both these statements only give one side of the story.
If they lead you to drink more alcohol than you intended, eat that extra food you’re not really hungry for, or have anything that you know wont make you feel great.. You could argue that’s not helping you enjoy yourself.
It feels good for the short time you have it. But then you have to deal with feeling bloated / rubbish / regretting it the next day, and the frustration of continually struggling to reach your goals.
Essentially, if you know that losing excess weight would make you feel fantastic and enjoy life more…
Then having that extra food or drink in the moment is stopping you from enjoying that.
So saying YES to the extra food or drink, and temporary happiness or relief from a stressful day in the moment, can mean saying NO to the true (and huge) amount of happiness you’d feel from reaching your goals.
This isn’t the case all the time of course – sometimes the cake / chocolate / dessert / amazing meal / alcohol is special and worth it – and that’s great when it is.
But a lot of the time we use that thought to give in to having it. So that we don’t have to think, resist or do something different which feels uncomfortable in the moment. And then we don’t feel great after.
We stay stuck. And we don’t get the real enjoyment we want out of life.
Flipping the thoughts
We often convince ourselves exercise, eating well and saying no to tempting foods are hard. Chores. Things we have to do. Not fun.
And the opposite of that is enjoying ourselves. Eating and drinking what we want in the moment. Living a little. Having fun. Feeling free.
But I would argue you have more fun and feel more free when you are taking care of your health and body (most of the time). When you have energy, and feel fit, healthy and strong.
Exercise can feel amazing.
Healthy food can make you feel so much better than poor quality processed or rich indulgent foods do.
How we frame things is so key.
There are always different perspectives you can choose on the exact same topic.
And different ways of thinking about it can make you feel a completely different way.
If you don’t have good thoughts about something, you wont do it long term.
So how do we make weight loss more fun and easy to do?
First, choose to focus on the good things – the benefits, and how great they make you feel.
Remember this is all your choice – you are allowed whatever you want.
No one is forcing you to do this – you’re doing it because you want to feel better, and it can make you feel better.
You can still include your favourite foods and rest, as well as do exercise, and they are really important things to do.
As with most things, it’s about finding balance.
Practical steps to make food and fitness easier
Practically, you can make healthy choices easier by planning things in – building habits and routines that work for you.
A weekly food shop with staple ingredients like easy protein foods, fresh and frozen fruit and veg, is a game changer – see my graphic below for a few ideas.
You could a food shop ordered to arrive on a specific day each week, or have a set day and time when you go to do it.
Find healthy meals you enjoy. Write down what your favourite healthy foods are and buy them regularly.
For meals, aim to make your bowl or plate as colourful as possible.
It always feels good to look at a plate of colour, and this way you’re getting more fibre and nutrients from different fruit and veg. Eat the rainbow, as they say.
Remember habits take time, and you don’t have to eat perfectly all the time.
Plan in your favourite less nutritious foods, so it makes it easier to say no to the generic stuff that might be tempting but isn’t actually amazing.
Keep remembering that you saying no to temptations that wont make you feel great anyway, is you saying YES to your goals.
And you can feel great now – you don’t have to wait for the scales to allow you to feel good.
The scales will change as long as you keep going.
Make walking a daily habit
Track your steps to see where you’re at and motivate yourself to do a bit more if needed. If you’re not close to 8000 or more on average, see where you could fit a bit more in.
Could you do a short walk first thing in the morning, before work, at lunch, or after work?
Could you take the stairs more, walk up escalators, get off the bus or train a stop early?
Habits make it easier to be active naturally and not have to think about it.
Could you walk somewhere in nature where it can be really enjoyable too?
If its hard to get 8-10k steps every day in the week, could you do longer walks in nature at the weekend to boost up your overall average?
Book exercise like strength training or classes into your calendar as an appointment with yourself.
Have your kit, and any food or drink you need, ready ahead of time so it’s grab and go. Make everything as easy and streamlined as possible.
And then feel proud when you’ve done it.
The more you choose to feel good about things and enjoy them, the more your brain gets a hit of dopamine and wants to do it again.
You feel benefits, see progress, momentum builds.
And then things become habits, routines, a lot easier, and results follow.
To sum up how to make weight loss enjoyable…
Essentially, you will create more of what you focus on.
So keep focusing on choices you want to make, and feeling good about the process.
If you continue to do this, when you look back in a few month’s time, you will be amazed at how far you’ve come.
For examples of this, check out my testimonials here:
Client Results
There are plenty of episodes all about weight loss, mindset, nutrition, menopause, strength training and more on my podcast:
Think Healthy with Hayley
And to find out more about how I can help you, check out the link below:
Online Coaching for Health, Fitness and Weight Loss
