Most people start out a weight loss program with good motivation for weight loss. They find a diet and/or exercise program that appeals to them and they get excited about losing weight as they begin. The problem is, that excitement doesn’t last long in the majority of cases and many people begin to “cheat” on their weight loss programs within just a few days, and most ultimately give up completely within a few weeks.

Regardless of the weight loss program, it is going to fail if you don’t stick to it and give up before it ever has any chance of providing you with any noticeable results. What seems like sufficient motivation when you begin your weight loss efforts is probably not going to be sufficient to keep you going until you reach your weight loss goal. You must make conscious efforts to consitently make an effort to “motivate to lose weight”, just as much as you must consistently follow your diet and exercise program.

Just wanting to drop some pounds is simply not enough to get highly motivated and stay that way. To lose weight, you will have to put forth a significant amount of effort, regardless of what the marketing hype about how easy a weight loss program is might lead you to believe. To stay on track and make the necessary changes in your eating and exercise habits, you need strong, emotional motivating factors. You need to experience strong emotions to stay adequately motivated and you need to be able to access those strong emotions on a moment’s notice to keep you from giving in to moments of weakness that make you want to cheat.

Emotional leverage is the necessary ingredient for highly effective motivation to lose weight. In most cases, emotional leverage is most powerful when it comes from the desire to avoid negative feelings. Because of this, it is necessary to get in touch with whatever negative feelings you may have that are producing your desire to lose weight. Many people do everything they can to avoid experiencing intense negative feelings, but to be able to accomplish the goals of weight loss, experiencing negative emotion in an intense way is necessary to getting strongly motivated to keep you on track with your diet and exercise regimen and meet your weight loss goals.

I think it is important to give a word of caution here. If you are not willing or able to handle dealing with strong negative emotions at this time, you should stop reading this article right now and forget about trying to lose weight for the time being, as trying to lose weight will only be a frustrating experience without proper motivation.

You must be willing to take a hard look inward to get to the emotions behind wanting to lose weight. As an example, if being overweight makes you feel fat and ugly, really associate to that feeling. Take it a step further and figure out how those feelings are effecting your life in other ways. Perhaps you’re living a lonely life because you are starting to avoid social situations because you feel fat and ugly and think that others will view you the same way. Whatever negative emotions regarding your weight that you can access, really investigate them and really feel the pain. That pain is going to be the “fuel” that drives you to lose the excess weight once and for all and keep it off!