You are sick and tired of being sick and tired.  What are you sick and tired of???  Being overweight!!!  You have tried many different diets, you have been to many different gyms, and you have talked to many different people.  So you just give up and tell yourself, you are better off “enjoying” life, rather than burdening yourself with something you cannot figure out.  Well many of the weight loss issues that most people have are primarily mental.   The number one issue is you have not spent enough consistent effort to figure out why you are not losing weight.  Consistent effort is researching and putting into action things that you research for 1 to 2 years. Being consistent requires you to exercise for a minimum of 3 times per week within that 1 to 2 years. Within that time frame, you will definitely have figured out, how to overcome any barrier to your weight loss.  Well let’s get into the details of some of the mental and physical barriers that you may have.

1. Fear of failure.

When you already believe you are going to fail then you may look at the problem as not worth tackling.  Also publicly failing is a fear that is difficult to deal with.  Many people see failure as a diminishing of their self worth.  One way to overcome the fear of failure, is looking at the problem in a wholistic way.  You should ask yourself what is the worst that can happen from the failure, with weight loss the worst that will happen is you will learn new things about your body.  Also you should look at the timeline for success, in weight loss you have your whole life to succeed, so why quit??  You should learn to set small goals and celebrate the small wins.  Instead of focusing on losing 100 pounds, focus on how to lose 2 pounds this week, or how to not eat ice cream this week.  When you accomplish your small goal, allow yourself to feel good about your accomplishment.

2. Questioning if it’s worth it

When going on a weight loss journey, it requires a lot of sacrifice.  If you have doubt in your mind if losing weight is worth the effort, you will not complete the journey.  In order to complete such a difficult task, you need to have no doubt in your mind that the benefits greatly out weight the sacrifice.  The way to ensure that you have a proper perspective is to make friends, or be around people that are in shape.  You will be able to recognize some of the positive qualities of being in shape and that will give you a better understanding of the benefits, when it’s up close and personal. 

3. Self-doubt

You may be paralyzed with fear, about where to start and how to start.  Many times when we embark on a big journey it can be so overwhelming that we refuse to start.  We don’t think we have the knowledge or the ability to overcome this obstacle.  In order to defeat self doubt you must understand and be okay with the fact that you do not know everything. Being that you don’t know a lot you must be willing to learn, willing to research and be willing to do all of that on the fly, small bits at a time.  You need to act, learn, and learn some more in that order.  If you need extra help get with a personal trainer and or a nutritionist to get expert advice.

4. Boredom

One of the biggest barriers to staying in shape is being tired of doing the same repetitive things over and over.  When it comes to food, you are constantly eating the same chicken breast or salmon, with exercise you only know to run on the treadmill and do squats.  Well in order to compete with the excitement of living a unhealthy lifestyle, you are going to have to come to terms with a few things.  Living a unhealthy lifestyle will ALWAYS BE MORE FUN, then living a healthy lifestyle.  But the problem is the consequences of that unhealthy lifestyle is too high.  It’s like comparing going on vacation to your job, vacation will always win, but then you will have no money if you stay on vacation.  So you must stop comparing the two lifestyles, but you must find a way to make a healthy lifestyle, a good lifestyle, and not torture.  The way to do this is find a few meals that fit within your time constraints and rotate those meals, do that for 2 to 3 months, then find another set of healthy meals that you can rotate. When it comes to exercise you must find joy in the progress of getting stronger and getting faster.  So make sure you track the progress of your exercises and look to get stronger and faster every 2 weeks, so it gives you something to look forward to.

5. Not seeing results quickly enough

Through the commercialization of fitness it has lead us to believe that fitness results are to be fast.  But you should be more educated with how fast your body will change and the amount of effort that it will take for you to lose the weight.  A person loses 1 to 2 pounds a week living a healthy and active lifestyle, so that’s 4 to 8 pounds a month.  In order to see significant muscle growth, ie get toned you will begin to see significant body change every 2 to 3 months.  Muscle grows slowly, but fat burns fairly quickly compared to the growth of muscles.  You need to be patient and consistent to make it happen for yours.

6. Comparing yourself to others

With social media being as big as it is, there are so many friends and strangers showing off and living fake lives, and sometimes real lives, in the public. There is nothing wrong with looking at other people for motivation, but it becomes detrimental when you beat yourself up, when you are not able to become another person or you are not able to develop a body part the way another person can.  You must do soul searching and understand that there are some positive qualities about another person that you cannot attain and there are positive qualities about yourself that other people cannot attain.  In other words we all need to count our blessings.  You can find motivation from anywhere but overall you need to have a understanding that you are actually competing with yourself, you are trying to become the better version of yourself. 

7. It’s all so overwhelming, you don’t even know where to begin

Fitness goals can be daunting especially when your goal is to lose 100 pounds. When walking up the stairs is difficult, how are you supposed to exercise everyday???  Well in order to overcome the initial thought of doubt and fear, you need to find a basic fitness routine and repeat that routine over and over.  You should become a expert in that routine and continue doing that routine for 4 to 6 months.  You should track the routine and know how many reps of each exercise you can do in a specific time and make sure your reps increase over the month.  When you start to see progress in your exercise, that means you are building muscles and getting in better shape. Setting exercise goals and seeing progress in your exercise routine stops boredom.  On the nutrition side, you should eliminate the obviously bad things from your diet, and then follow a specific meal plan for 3 to 4 months.  In that 3 to 4 months you should be researching diets that can work for your lifestyle on a permanent basis.

 8. You don’t want it bad enough

You may not have the motivations to lose weight but you are trying to lose weight because of what everyone around you is saying.  This will not lead to long lasting weight loss.  There has to be something inside of you that wants to lose weight and live a healthy lifestyle.  You may need to get therapy from a psychologist, or talk to a friend, but ultimately you need to talk to yourself and understand the positive life you are missing out on.

9. You have no support

A journey is always easier traveled in a group, to make your exercise journey easier you should find friends that have interest in fitness. You can find these people in gyms, at a park, or anywhere physical activities occur.  Your regular friends that are not living a healthy lifestyle, you will have to pick and choose when you all can hang out, if you are not ready just yet, to go out and face temptations.  Even though you may hurt some feelings, your true friends will want the best for you and will have a understanding that you are trying to do better for yourself.