What is the difference between someone who reaches their health goals, and someone who doesn’t? Consider this question now, then after you’ve read my post, come back to see if you’ve had any insight around this.
What is ‘motivation?’
Most people would say it is a feeling ‘to do’ something. It looks easy when we’re feeling good, hard when we’re not. It seems to come and go, wax and wane, and while we mostly always start anything we do with the best of intentions, often when the feeling of ‘motivation’ leaves us, we’re at a loss as to what to do. We’re filled with habitual thoughts that reflect beliefs around lack of discipline, unworthy, unable to do anything… all unhelpful thoughts I will show you are not worthy of your attention.
I have found that a better way to describe motivation, is to think of more like your state of mind, or your mood. Whether we act, or don’t act, usually comes down to the attention we give the thinking we have at any given moment.
“Your state of mind determines your clarity of mind in the moment.”
But guess what?
Moods are a part of normal human behaviour. They go up and down, and change like the weather.
How caught up in your state of mind you get will determine your ease of flow through your day… and you level of motivation to get things done.
Do you totally believe your thinking from a place of a low mood? OR…
Are you able to observe, stand back, get curious… without being drawn in?
In low moods, our habitual mind is LOUD, BOSSY, and it doesn’t want us to change.
How much we are impacted by this natural ebb & flow of our state of mind in any moment is going to come down to our understanding of our where our experience of life is coming from, and the fact that most of what we ‘think’ is totally optional.
When we want to change our behaviour, we have to focus on new thinking. Not the old, stale habitual thinking that has kept you doing the same things over and over.
It’s so important to understand what drives our behaviour, if we want to change it. But what drives behaviour is largely invisible to most people.
“The most obvious and important realities are often the ones that are hardest to see.” David Foster Wallace.
We are always driven to act from thought in the moment. Always, no exception. Thought leads to a feeling (although sometimes we notice the feeling first), which leads to behaviour, which leads to a result.
How often have you paid attention to the thought/feeling/behaviour connection? If you’re anything like me, I had no awareness of this… until I did. But once you start to become aware of it, you will start to notice this connection and wake a lot more up to your experience of life.
In order to change behaviour, we have to create space between your reaction… and the habitual mind which is where all your habitual thinking sits.
Seeing yourself as separate from this habitual, mostly unhelpful, brain junk is the key to effortless behaviour change. Seeing this at a deep level allows for change to just happen as our thinking changes.
But… you don’t need to get busy on changing your thoughts. It’s way easier than that. All we need to see is that we can ‘opt out’ of the unhelpful thinking. And you will know this thinking because it doesn’t feel good, it’s often the same thoughts that go around and around, and it’s very bossy, loud and STRONG (like your life depends on your attention to it).
When we’re trying to stay motivated and change our behaviour, it is these old, familiar and habitual thoughts that return which gets in our way. We believe them, we follow them, and motivation looks lost.
The difference between someone who appears totally motivated in life… is simply the thinking they pay attention too.
What about motivation as it specifically relates to staying in the low carb lifestyle game?
In a perfect world, this wouldn’t even be something requiring your effort, because we would all be eating the proper human diet of animal foods, some seasonal veggies and fruit.
But this is so far from being the case.
HOWEVER… the power lies within YOU.
You don’t need the world to change ‘out there’. You actually just need to change the way you see it from inside of you.
“When you change the way you look at things, the things you look at change.”
Here are my top 5 tips on staying motivated on the low carb lifestyle.
- Know You Why. Metabolic health is your birthright!! With most of the chronic modern diseases today caused by diet and lifestyle, changing your lifestyle is what is going to reverse (or prevent this from happening in the first place). If your why doesn’t start with YOU, then you need to spend some time looking at why you don’t believe you deserve health. If you were born, you deserve it. It doesn’t matter what went on in the past. You deserve health. It all starts with you.
- Drop the diet thinking and take the time to adopt this as a lifestyle. This is not about perfection (which doesn’t exist), it’s much more around consistency. Be curious, experiment, try different things. There is no ‘one size fit’s all approach.’ Be in it for the long game. What are you going to do after your 6 week challenge is over? Make the decision to search for real health and healing, which doesn’t come in a 6 week program. Be in it for the long game. Hold your beliefs lightly! Know your brain is going to be loud with everything you’ve believed up until now. Don’t fear that. Know it’s just your brain doing what brains do, and you simply don’t have to pay attention to them. Release them, and focus on the present moment. Make your choices for today, leave tomorrow for tomorrow, and let the past go.
- Know your brain does not want you to change! Expect it to be uncomfortable. Watch those old habits and beliefs come up, but start to create space for curiosity around your attention to it. You may have believed for a long time that saturated fat will make you fat and causes heart disease. Now you’re learning that is doesn’t. Expect your mind to keep pushing for the old beliefs. You will get better at stepping away from it.
- Get the knowledge you need! Learn the science. Understand why it’s so important to avoid insulin resistance. Understand why insulin resistance is either directly or indirectly related to almost every one of todays chronic health conditions. Listen to podcasts, read books, arm yourself with the knowledge so you don’t get swayed by the old dogma. The Low Carb Lifestyle Hub is a great place to start gaining your knowledge, or my online program, The Complete Guide to Low Carb Living.
- Setbacks are 100% going to happen. Expect them! You’re not a robot, you’re a perfectly imperfect human being. It’s not the setbacks that matter, but what you tell yourself when they do. Do you let those pesky habitual thoughts take over? Do you think it means something about you as a human being? All it means that in that moment, that was the best choice you saw to make given the thinking that you had. That’s it. You are not your thinking. It’s not who you are. Seeing yourself much deeper than that is where true freedom lives. My blog post, Going Back to the Old Cupboard explains this in more details.
Stick with it. It get’s easier! No one can do this for you. It has to come from you. Be kind to yourself, and show yourself more compassion than you ever have before in your life. Because remember, the capacity you have to show this to yourself, is the capacity you’re able to show this to others.
I can help you navigate all of this, so you can get on your path to the freedom that comes with good health.
Tracey xx