Why Do You Want to Lose Weight Using Keto?

For weight loss to be successful, you need to ask yourself:
Why do you want to lose weight?

No matter which diet you choose, weight loss is going to be hard work. It's going to take motivation and lots of self discipline. And that requires you to change how you think, as well as how you eat.

Most New Year's resolutions fail because people don't go on a diet for the right reasons. Once they're on a diet, they don't take the steps necessary to turn it into a lifestyle.

To succeed on Atkins, or any other ketogenic diet, you have to uncover why you really want to lose the weight.

With Christmas and the holidays behind you, the next step is to turn your focus toward the new year and what you want to accomplish. For many folks, that means getting into shape, and making New Years' Resolutions, such as:

• make better food choices
• lose a few pounds
• kick up your activity level

These New Years' Resolutions become a priority whenever January rolls around.

Does that sound like you?


If so, then it's time to ask your self the following questions:

• Are you dissatisfied with the way you are?
• Are you thinking about going on a low-carb diet?
• Do you feel that weight loss will improve your life?
• Do you believe Keto will help you fit into some ideal?
• Why do you really want to lose weight?

Since most New Year's resolutions fail, the answers to all of these questions, and more, will determine your ability to succeed on Atkins or Keto.

Or any diet at all.

Why Do Most New Year's Resolutions Fail?

Have you ever noticed that very few people are able to stick with their New Year's resolutions for more than a few weeks?

It's true.

Over 90-percent of all those who set one or more New Year's resolutions in December or January go on to fail to meet their goals. Lots of people have theories about why motivation and self-discipline fades, but most of those theories encourage you to blame your self.

Some of the theories regarding why New Year's Resolutions fail include:

• You don't have enough willpower.
• You didn't make the right goals.
• You aren't being specific enough.
• You are a creature of habit.
• You're taking too large of a first step.

And on and on it goes. You are always to blame for your failures.

So what's the answer?

If you listen to the experts, then you didn't do the diet correctly. If you just did it right, if you just did it their way, you'd be successful. You'd magically have the self-discipline to make it happen.

But just how true is that?

People have been writing "how to succeed at making New Year's resolutions" articles for decades. They have been offering you all kinds of advice and motivation, encouraging you to diet in a certain way. Their way.

And yet:

You still fail to reach the ideal of what you believe you should be.

If all of these methods really worked, you wouldn't need any more New Year's Resolution articles.

The Nitty-Gritty Truth Behind Our Motivations

It's easy to tell someone that all they need is more willpower, that strength of will is the answer to all of their problems, and that you can trick the lower brain or reprogram your mechanical behavior by just taking little tiny baby steps, so the brain won't figure out what you're doing.

That may or may not be true. I don't know.

I've never tried to do it that way because the nitty-gritty down-and-dirty truth that sits at the heart of motivation is that most of us just don't have the ability to make up our minds to the point where we can actually accomplish something major.

Do you have the personal power to make up your mind
and follow through with your decision?
Each and every time? Most people do not.

You might have strength when it comes to the little things in your life, but making major changes to your body, lifestyle, and belief system is often beyond reach.

You can see that each and every time life interferes with dietary goals and you cave into your old habits and ways of being. If you really believed that a standard American diet was destructive, you wouldn't eat that way. Ever.

And that's part of the reason why so many fail to make permanent changes.

I understand that now.

• You do what you believe is right. Always.
• You do what you feel you should be doing.
• You do what you feel justified in doing.

But more importantly:

You may be doing what other people have told you that you must do or should do if you want to be healthy -- instead of doing what you really want to do.

If you really wanted to lose weight the low-carb way, if you really wanted to live a low-carb lifestyle for the rest of our life, you would do so.

The fact that most of us find low-carb unsustainable or difficult to stick with, almost impossible to maintain, and we make excuses for not making it happen, is because we aren't doing what we WANT to do.

You're probably chasing after someone else's desires, dreams, and goals instead of your own.

But that's the same for everything you do.

Lack of motivation and self discipline isn't peculiar to a low-carb diet. Or any diet for that matter. Success depends on your ability to clearly see what you want and your ability to act on what you see.

Examine Your Motivations for Wanting to Lose Weight

Before you start your low-carb diet, get a sheet of paper and write down the reasons why you want to lose weight.

• What do you expect Keto to do for you?
• Do you think it will solve all of your current health problems?
• Will Keto make you happy to drop those excess pounds?
• Will life be more comfortable and pleasant if you're thin?
• Are you looking for acceptance or a feeling of importance?
• Do you think losing weight will get rid of your feelings of inferiority?

Whatever it is you think that losing weight is going to do for you write it down.

What is losing weight going to do for you?
What do you expect to get for your time and effort? 
Write it down!

Writing it down makes it easier to re-evaluate those reasons by enabling you to take a serious look at your word choices. The words you use will reveal some of your hidden motivations.

Look for words, such as:

• should
• ought
• must
• victim
• or need

These are signals that you are not doing this for yourself. If you're expecting a low-carb diet to bring:

• future happiness
• pleasure
• attention
• a sense of importance
• approval

Or some other ideal, your motivation might not be strong enough to pull it off.

For example, if you do manage to lose the weight and you don't receive the attention, pleasure, and happiness you're seeking after -- then what? 

Are you just going to chuck it all and go back to eating carbohydrates?

A low-carb diet isn't magic.

It's designed to correct metabolic imbalances. It isn't designed to solve the issues you have with your self.

What is the True Power Behind Motivation?

The power behind motivation is to be vitally interested
in living the low-carb lifestyle, no matter what. 

Willpower isn't enough.

That's the cold, hard truth.

While it can ignite your interest and spark a little initial enthusiasm, that interest and excitement will fizzle the first time the number gets stuck on the scale or when things don't move as quickly as you expect them to.

You'll feel like throwing in the towel because you aren't getting your way, because you can't force your body to do what you want it to do.

I've been at that point before, and the outcome wasn't pretty.

Willpower is based on ideals. It is expecting a certain outcome from putting out a certain amount of effort.

The problem with that?

Being responsible for our food choices and attempting to create new patterns of behavior doesn't come by way of willpower.

So, why is that?

Because willpower is trying to do something you don't want to do.

That rarely works. In fact, willpower is the number one reason for our New Year's resolutions not working out. It's not that you don't have any motivation. The truth is that you have too much! You're very motivated to fight against dieting.

So dump the willpower and:

Take a closer look at what you're interested in.

Interest is what really motivates you to make up your mind about what you want to do. Interest is the driving force that gets the job done.

Doing what you have to do or what you think you ought to do doesn't motivate you.

Think about that for just a minute.

If you are really interested in something, vitally interested, you can hardly wait to get up in the morning and get to work on what you want to do.

Right?

Dieting is no different.

If you are truly interested in moving to a low-carb lifestyle, a little thing like only losing a couple of pounds the first week, running into your first real stall, or beginning to miss some of your favorite foods you used to eat won't stop you from continuing to restrict your carbohydrate intake.

Why?

Because you cannot not do low carb.

If you have honestly made up your mind to do this, you will be so interested in living a ketogenic lifestyle, so satisfied with what you can eat on Keto, so convinced that Atkins or Nutritional Ketosis or whatever diet plan you're following is the healthiest way to live that you will rise up to meet the challenges -- regardless of what they are.

Giving up and moving on to something else won't be an option, even when you hit a wall, because you won't be able to see yourself eating in any other way.

The power of motivation comes from doing things you are interested in doing. There is no real power in willpower. Willpower is an illusion. It's a fantasy. It's falling back on your desire to please other people.

Keto is for Life

When you try to use willpower to lose weight, it will always fail because a strong desire to do something is essential for success.

Yes, success takes purpose and it takes a strong will.

But that purpose and strong will come from being vitally interested in what you're doing.

If there's no real interest, your desire to do low carb is going to fade within a few short weeks, just as soon as those little voices in your head start talking to you about all of the fat you didn't lose this week.

Desire is necessary to ignore those head voices
that try to shame you for not losing weight.

Once desire fades, you'll start to crave carbohydrates or begin to make excuses to cheat on your diet. And from there, it's just a slippery slope down the hill to where you were before you started.

If you're interested in trying a low-carb diet -- really interested -- and not just doing it because you think you should lose a few pounds, or because you think that a low-carb diet is going to magically solve some of your inner conflicts or emotional issues, then it can be a very rewarding, pleasant experience.

Just make sure that you take the time to search your heart to learn if this is what you really want to do because a low-carb diet isn't a bandaid.

A low-carb diet is for life.

If you're truly interested in switching to a low-carb lifestyle, rather than turning low carb into some sort of temporary crash diet, check out our low-carb beginner's guide. It explains what carbohydrates are, and gives you all of the information you need to make a truly successful start on your new life.