I’m Nagina, a professional online weight loss coach that helps ambitious women lose weight, and I want to share a simple trick I use to help motivate my clients that you can use, too:
Replace the sugar in your morning coffee with cinnamon.
Why?
Cinnamon has incredible health benefits. When you replace sugar with cinnamon, you help your blood sugar stabilize, avoid excess fat storage, and satisfy your sweet tooth. You get to enjoy a gentle, spicy-sweet taste with all of the skin, antioxidant, anti-inflammatory, and fat burning benefits that come along with it. Sound too easy?
Something as simple as adding cinnamon to your coffee might seem insignificant, but small changes can make a big impact on your motivation to keep the ball rolling. In fact, making too many big changes at once is overwhelming – the complete opposite of motivating – and can lead to burnout quickly. Want to learn more psychology-based weight loss strategies? Here are five more of my professional weight loss coaching tips on how to stay motivated while losing weight.
1. Drink a Glass of Infused Debloating Water
Losing weight should feel great. Drinking a glass of Infused Debloating Water (water with lemon, cucumber and mint) diffuses bloating and kickstarts your metabolism, but it’s about more than the physical effects – it’s about looking forward to what you eat and drink.
Remember the old cabbage soup diet, where you ate practically nothing but cabbage soup for a week in an attempt to “lose 10 pounds or more – fast!”? Fad diets like these are one of the quickest motivation killers when it comes to weight loss, likely leaving you feeling hungry, weak, sick, and bored.
So you need to look forward to what you are eating. Drinking Infused Debloating Water will make you feel like you’re indulging at a fancy spa. Here are a couple more tips in this vein that always keep my weight loss coaching clients motivated:
ADD simple ingredients to boost your metabolism
Cabbage soup may be great for a day but forcing yourself to stick to a restrictive diet where you eat the same foods over and over again with little variation is not only bad for your motivation and can leave you reaching for the breadbasket, it can also be harmful to your health. You deserve to eat food that smells, looks, and tastes mouthwatering – and that also nourishes your body and supercharges your metabolism. The trouble is that most busy professionals don’t have time to research and invest in healthy meal planning that
a. suits their lifestyles
b. saves them time
c. takes their food preferences into account
One of the reasons my clients have so much success is because I provide them with a shopping list and recipes for delicious meals they actually want to eat. Even something as easy as cooking with simple, everyday metabolism-boosting spices can help burn your fat 4x faster and also tastes delicious.
When you ADD spices and other fat-burning ingredients to your diet, your motivation to stay on track will soar. You’ll look forward to every delicious meal AND it helps you melt your fat faster.
Here’s one of my most popular recipes – my Carrot Cake Cinnamon Smoothie. Not only is it super-satisfying and melts fat like crazy – it takes less than three minutes to make and balances your blood sugar so you no longer have sugar cravings.
Speaking of saving time, all of the recipes I provide are simple and quick to prepare. I do the mental labor for you which saves you from countless hours researching healthy recipes and deciding what to eat (and shop for) every week. In fact, my system is so simple many of my clients are eventually able to prep their weekly meals in less than an hour.
Invest in your body. When you have the right kind of meals planned out for you, your food is pulling double duty. Not only do you look forward to what you’re eating every day and feeling satisfied, you’re also fueling your body with the right combination of nutrients it needs to increase and maintain your energy levels all day long. Say goodbye to that grumpy, mid-afternoon sugar crash.
2. Get vividly clear on your vision.
I’m going to ask you to take part in a fun experiment. Close your eyes and imagine – if you could wake up tomorrow with your personal weight loss goals fully achieved, what would that look like for you? What does it look and feel like to be at your goal weight?
Imagine…
What new outfits will you wear?
What size will you be shopping for?
What trips will you book?
How do you imagine your children will look at you?
What are people going to say that haven’t seen you for a year, or even more?
How will you feel walking into that big event fresh to death
What will your partner say when they see you on date night? Will their jaw drop?
What will your cholesterol, blood sugar, or blood pressure be at your medical appointment?
What else does your new life hold for you?
Whatever it is that you just imagined – you’ll need to stay focused on that dream every day.
Whether it’s a woman in a bikini, running a 5 or 10k, or hiking with her family, find one image of your goal (Pinterest can be a good source of image inspiration). Print it out and put it on your fridge, near your bathroom mirror, or even make it your screensaver. The point is, put it wherever you can remind yourself of it every day. Stay clear on your vision and you’ll feel motivated to do the work to get there.
3. Weigh AND Measure
As a weight loss coach, I know this statement to be true for almost everyone I work with: people have to see results to stay motivated. It’s very challenging to stay focused on your goals if you’re not seeing anything change through your efforts. When I gain a new client, I always consider what immediate changes they can make that would produce the biggest, fastest, results.
Results are far more than just a number on a scale, of course. Not everyone’s weight loss goals are tied to overall weight loss, nor should they be. My weight loss coaching programs track three different data points weekly so that clients can easily see that they are melting fat away through their meals and stay motivated: scale weight, measurements in key fat loss areas, and body fat percentage.
Here’s why.
Food is 80% of how to lose weight and shrink your waist. The changes that you make in the first week may not always show up on the scale right away, however, you can still be losing weight, and your measurements can show a decrease. It’s important to see noticeable results, which in turn keeps you motivated.
Seeing your measurements decrease, even when your scale weight isn’t budging, helps you to know that what you are doing is working towards fat loss. Then, a couple of weeks later when your scale weight finally catches up with your fat loss measurements, you feel like a superhero! That’s when your motivation can really explode. At Masala Body, we love to see it.
4. Find Someone to Hold you Accountable
The simple truth is that accountability is a critical factor in weight loss motivation. For many women, it’s easy to be accountable for other people’s needs – the last minute deadline at work you have to drop everything to meet, the birthday party you have to throw for your child this Saturday, that volunteer shift you signed up for when you were in a more giving mood last month – these are all promises you’ve made to others, and you likely have no problem seeing them through. But when it comes to accountability for themselves, women often put their own promises on the backburner.
Having someone besides yourself to hold you accountable is crucial. You need to be noticed, checked in on, and cared for just as much as anyone else. You need to be seen and feel supported through the normal barriers to weight loss – the deadlines, trips, and other unexpected events that come up and make consistency challenging. When you have someone to check in with on a daily or even weekly basis, it’s less likely that you’ll lose sight of your goal and forget to plan your meals or have the right foods easily available to choose. (An added benefit of having a weight loss coach like me for accountability is that I have a ton of fun and healthy tips and tricks to get you through temptation, even when you’re letting loose.)
5. Join An Online Weight Loss Community
Just as important as accountability – joining an online community that understands your unique challenges and supports you through them is essential, and a large piece of what many women are missing when it comes to successfully losing weight. This means finding people online that are on the same path as you are and who are talking about the challenges you share. This could be (give generic examples).
When you place yourself in the company of people who are just like you and who struggled with your same challenges and overcame them, your mind will allow you to believe that if they can do it, so can you. When you’re in the process of losing weight, it’s natural to focus on the challenges. Being able to virtually connect with a community on those same challenges is one of the best ways to keep yourself motivated.
Why do I recommend an online community over an in-person support group? Ease of access, of course. Plus, you can more frequently connect on a deeper level with others in the group, but on your own terms. In fact, research shows that people who make more connections in online weight-loss communities lose more weight.
The community that I’ve built through Masala Body is one of my proudest accomplishments and is a big secret to the success of my clients. Our Masala Body community includes:
- Weekly Zoom meetings to share challenges and questions – get answers to questions you didn’t even know you had, meaning more transformation in less time!
- A robust website, full of resources for people to share and access recipes, strategies, mindsets, and affirmations.
- Live cooking demos where we chat in real-time and I teach attendees how to make mouthwatering recipes (like healthy chocolate desserts)!
You shouldn’t have to feel alone on your weight loss path and dealing with partners and friends can be especially difficult to navigate when it feels like you’re the only one eating mindfully. You can’t bring everyone in our community out to dinner with you, but you can bring their knowledge, experience, and supportive words of encouragement to motivate you to make wise choices.
Interested in learning more about how MasalaBody will keep you motivated while you reach your weight loss goals? Check out my 8-Week Slimdown Jumpstart personal weight loss program or my 12-Month Slimdown Transformation, which offers an extra dose of accountability. You can also book a call with me if you’re ready to get started..
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