How do you get motivated to exercise and eat right?

Yes! Forget the traditional idea of a DIET. What you need to focus on is eating better. Not perfectly, not sticking to a 'diet', simply eating better. For a week, set a few goals such as drinking at least 8 glasses of water a day, making sure you eat 4-6 small meals, and keeping your calorie count within a certain range. A site like www.sparkpeople.com or www.fitday.com can help because they have an online food database with nutrition information for thousands of different items. Keeping an online or written journal helps too, because then you know what you ate and when, and you can see a pattern when you look back. Try to do this every day for a week. As far as exercise, you can approach this two ways. Find things that you don't consider exercise but that still count, like playing tag, frisbee, or catch with your kids. Rollerblade or rollerskate, ride a bike, ride a horse. Take a hike either up a mountain or around a lake, somewhere where the scenery will help take your mind off the time involved. Or two - get a friend involved, make regular appointments you write on your calendar or day planner and memos you store in your cell phone with reminders 'gym at 10 am' or 'meet John for tennis on Thursday', etc. If you regularly meet someone to work out with, you then help to motivate and hold each other accountable, nobody wants to be stood up! Start slow, just aim for 3-5 days a week and start with say 15-20 minutes. It could be an easy walk and a chat. Ahhh, the cravings. Overhaul your kitchen and pantry. Get rid of the temptations. If you cannot 'eat just one', then get rid of all of it for a little while. Replace the 'crappy foods' with healthier alternatives that fill the same craving space, such as nuts and popcorn instead of potato chips and cheetos, dried fruit instead of sour patch kids and gummi worms, yogurt and granola or frozen yogurt or sherbet instead of ben and jerry's ice cream, a baked potato with herbs and spices and some parmesan instead of a box of french fries, etc. Watch your portion sizes, try to eat more of things that are lower calorie but bulky, so they fill you up. That would be things like most veggies, most fresh fruit, popcorn counts too as long as it is not the movie theater 'drowned in oil' variety. Healthy sources of fats also include avocados, olive oil, nuts, peanut or almond butters, etc. Each day you stick to your goals means you're getting somewhere. It takes 30 days to build a new habit, don't feel guilty if you make a mistake, we all do from time to time. Successful people aren't folks who never make mistakes. We are the ones who don't let mistakes prevent us from starting over again.

I cannot really say that I'm good in dieting and exercising. It takes discipline. My way of doing it is doing treadmills every morning while watching the TV's morning news. If I'm late for the news, I'd look for some VCDs or DVDs in my father's drawer and play it while doing treadmills. I even play those videos that I've played before as long as they're good movies. I do this so that I won't focus so much on my treadmilling. I can do treadmill while forgetting that I am actually doing exercise because I'm focused towards what I am seeing on TV. And then I have my breakfast. Breakfast is the most important meal because in my opinion I have to fuel myself to full tank before I go about with my hectic day. Then as the day comes to an end, the smallest meal would be dinner. I'm not really very strict with dieting but what I bear in mind is that I do not eat when I am not hungry not only because I'm dieting, but also because it's gluttony if I over-eat. Glottony is a sin in my Christian religion. I eat snacks once in while too. I'm not so strict on those things. In my opinion it's better to eat often during the day than eat huge meals less frequently. You'll have the tendency to undigest food eating huge meals. When the stomach stops grinding food, the extra food would be useless. All it will be stored in the body instead of being used as sources of energy.

Rather than trying different kinds of diets just try changing your eating habits for the better. Diets only work for as long as you are on them and no one wants to eat cabbage soup forver! If you have trouble sticking to healthy foods all of the time rememebr that it is important to treat yourself occasionally. If you deny yourself something you want it more and then you end up eating double of what you would have and any weight you loose will go straight back on. It is important to be dedicated but not so strict you make yourself misserable. Have a treat day each week. Do not feel guilty about eating junk food then because this is your treat to yourself. Do not eat too much though because you dont wnat to out do your hard work. Kepp healthy foods in the house so you are snacking on things like fruit rather than sweets etc. Something you can try to get yourself motivate dis imagine yourself at how you wnat to look? Do you have a dress size you wish to aim for? Do you have a celebrity body influence? If so get a photo of them and look at it when you feel like you need some motivation. Do you have an event you want to lose weight for? Hvaing small goals will defiently help you. When you feel like eating lots of junk food try to keep your mind (and hands) busy by doing something else like reading or knitting. Go for a walk.

Let me suggest that you put up as many mirrors as you can in your room or in the office where you stay most of the time. Everytime you turn and see yourself in the mirror and you really want to lose weight, you will get motivated just like what I did. Less Food intake could help, just make sure you drink lots of water. You can eat fruits and vegetable. You can still have a nice fruit shake. If you wont be able to hang mirrors, you may place some Pin-Ups or Posters of the body figure you want to achieve. Hope this could help.