If you have a hard time thinking of good reasons for losing weight, how about you try carrying a Thanksgiving turkey around in a backpack everywhere, every day and see how you feel.
I'll spare you the trouble: you'll feel horrible. Granted, carrying all the weight you need to lose (give or take) in the form of a Butterball suspended from your back is much more uncomfortable than having it spread over your body throughout your face and all the way down to your toes, but it'll give you some idea of all the extra work your body has to do every day in getting you from point A to B.
I remember dismissing all the chatter about how being overweight makes you excessively fatigued as fitness freak happy talk, but it's true. I used to be tired all the time and just chalked it up to the way a normal person feels after a full day's work. And, when I initially started this plan, I felt even worse because I was not only fat and tired but now hungry and grouchy too. But, as the weight loss started to accrue, I started noticing subtle changes in my energy and how much less exertion it took for certain tasks like walking up hills, for instance.
For another example, I've always commuted to work on my bike. It's about 6 miles each way with plenty of hills. Without even thinking about it, I noticed while logging my cycling times in my Fitbit that my travel times were starting to drop. In fact, my commute home, which is slightly more uphill than the commute in, is now about 4 minutes faster than it used to be. I used to do it in 34 minutes, and it now takes 30 flat.
I also have fewer breakdowns now since my bike is under a lot less stress. I used to be vigilant about shedding every excess ounce from my work backpack, and I was always super proud of the fact that my road bike is made of ultra-light titanium and only weighs something like 19 pounds. Meanwhile, there is zero difference between excess pounds on your bike frame and pounds on your ass. I knew this, yet I let my body weight run wild anyway.
Why do we do this to ourselves? Why do we deliberately weigh ourselves down with junk in the form of fat that does absolutely nothing for us? Oh, it makes you a little warmer in the winter. Great, grab a sweatshirt. Why do we allow ourselves to overpay by thousands every year for the privilege of being fat? We do it because we aren't sick enough of the problem to do something about it.
People are motivated by different things, but studies have shown that anger is among the best. Fear is also a good one if you can harness it, but the problem with using fear for major lifestyle changes is that it usually requires a sudden, near death experience to work and by then it may already be too late to make a difference.
My grandfather used to smoke a couple of packs of cigarettes a day when he had his heart attack, which he thankfully survived. He was an ex-smoker the next day, as was my grandmother, and they each lived another 20 years. He was lucky. You shouldn't count on surviving your avoidable health crisis down the road and having that frighten you into action. Get this fixed now.
That's why I encourage you to spend some time finding your motivational quote. You don't have to hang it all over your house. As long as it's memorable and something you keep thinking about, that's all you need. If you can't find one you like, make your own like I did:
"At some point, a man gets tired of looking at the same damn problem every goddamn day when he knows exactly what he needs to do to fix it but doesn't. Today is your day to fix it, and you're going apeshit."
Feel free to use that if it works for you. I find that it particularly helped me during the rough patches because it reflected my mood and helped fuel my determination.
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