Starting at an early age I was overweight.
Going through school when you are overweight isn't always a great experience.
Although the people I was around were mostly great people, there were still times when I would be teased.
This didn't happen often, but it didn't help my already low self-esteem that I had because of the extra weight.
Later in life, I decided that I wanted to lose the extra weight that I had been carrying around for all those years.
I now realize that at the time what I wanted was confidence.
I wanted the confidence to talk to those women I had always considered out of my league and the confidence that I could attract those same people.
I wanted the confidence to take off my shirt in public, or even in private with another person.
I wanted confidence to wear wanted I wanted and not what I thought would cover the things I was so insecure about.
What I wanted would change later, but the confidence would still come as well.
I began to try different weight loss methods, but it didn't take long before I ran into problems.
These problems weren't hard to overcome.
I just needed to take a little time to see what worked and what didn't.
I will try to summarize some of the problems that I encountered.
The first problem that I had quickly became apparent.
With my previous ability to get things done quickly and effectively, I had developed a habit of procrastination.
In my attempts at dieting I would say to myself, "I will start this tomorrow, but until then I am going to go all out and eat anything and everything I want.
" This would basically become a binge.
Although that isn't a healthy decision, I would have been fine with that if I had been able to stick with my original idea.
However, when the next day came I would say the same thing to myself as I said the previous day.
Therefore, the binge repeated itself.
The next day would be the same and so on.
Instead of losing the weight I was doing the exact opposite.
It didn't take long to realize this and often this would be end of my attempts at weight loss for another period of time.
I didn't feel like my will was strong enough to be able to start a diet.
I eventually overcame that habit, and I will list some things that worked for me and others that didn't here: Stay Focused: I would find myself doing other meaningless things, and being able to stop myself from doing those things did have a big impact of getting the more important things done.
Ask for a friend's help: I asked a friend to constantly remind me to get things done.
I started to get those things done because I was tired of hearing about it.
Might not be the best way, but I did have success with it Breaking Things Into Smaller Steps: This did not work for me.
I would just end up procrastinating on each step and end up and the same place I would have been.
This would probably help in combination with some of the things that did work, but I didn't need this after doing those other things.
Don't Expect Perfection: I could see how this would work, but it didn't work for me.
This really wasn't a reason why I was procrastinating so it made no difference in my habits.
My next problem was motivation.
For some, just wanting that confidence may be enough motivation, but I wasn't one of those people.
I would tell myself, "You are great the way you are, and if anybody doesn't like you this way then to hell with them.
" At the time, I was doing all this because of how I wanted others to see me and feel about me.
If I felt like I didn't have to change how they looked at me then I would never get the motivation to lose the weight.
Therein lied a major problem.
I should have been losing the weight for myself and not for others.
Yes, confidence was something for me, but that should have been an added bonus instead of what I used for motivation.
I tried different methods to get the motivation that I was lacking.
There is really no need to list those things here.
Instead I will only list the single largest contributor for getting motivated from my personal experience.
Do things for yourself: Once I started wanting to do things that were actually for myself instead of just thinking they were, things turned around quickly.
Rather than think about how others wanted me to look, I started to think about how I wanted to look.
Of course there were other problems that I ran into, but after getting over those two major ones, the others were extremely easy to overcome.
There are many different methods for getting over these, as well as pretty much any problem you have.
I only needed to spend a little time seeing what worked for me and what didn't.
You can find numerous methods were very little searching.
Anyone interested in hearing about what did and didn't work for me more thoroughly should feel free to ask.
I may also do other articles about these things on my personal blog website for anyone interested in my weight loss endeavors, which I will link at the end of this article.
In addition to that, I will be writing about diets, exercise programs, etc that I have tried.
My weight loss was a long struggle, but it didn't have to be.
Maybe my experience can help someone else with problems they have ran into.