Motivation is the most important aspect of good health. In psychology, this is called “discovering your why.” Ask yourself, “Why do I want to be healthy?” Is it just for yourself and your self-esteem? Is it to fit into societal expectations? Or do you want to be healthy for someone else, like a child or spouse? Or is there some long-term project you are working on that good health would help you achieve? Answering these questions and discovering your motivation is crucial to achieving good health.
Here is an example of a strong why. A woman is seventy-five pounds overweight, and her doctor tells her that her obesity will lead to an early death. She is more likely to get heart disease and is already pre-diabetic. She is statistically expected to die 15 years earlier than the general population. After hearing this information, this woman sits down and asks, “What does 15 years mean to me?”
She answers that those 15 years would contain many milestones for her granddaughter. She would miss her high school graduation, maybe her marriage, maybe the birth of her child. She also fancied being a famous author one day, and she and her husband wanted to travel to Ireland to trace her ancestors. In that moment, this woman creates a powerful “why” for getting healthy and losing sixty pounds. She wants to live to witness her granddaughter grow up, to keep writing, and to travel with her husband. If she doesn’t get healthy, she might lose all of that. This woman decides to write down her “why” on paper and keep it in her purse. Now, each time she works out and plans her meals, she thinks about everything she will do in those fifteen years.
What is your “why” for making better health choices this year? Your kids? Your job? Your significant other? Longevity and quality of life? Studies have found that most people fail in their New Year’s resolutions. The biggest reason for this failure is that they make nice-to-do resolutions instead of have-to-do resolutions. That’s because their motivation isn’t strong enough. They haven’t found their “why.”
If your resolution is to cut out fast food from your diet, sit down and hammer out why that’s important to you. If you keep it as a nice-to-do resolution, then most likely, you are going to fail in a moment of weakness. These moments of weakness are part of life. You argue with your spouse or partner. Your kids drive you crazy. Your boss yells at you at work. Then, you have a moment of weakness when a five-dollar hamburger sign catches your attention on the way home from work.
In that moment of weakness, you will find strength from your why. If you don’t have that why, you will probably use the stress of life to break your resolution
We hope everyone reading this finds ways to improve their health in 2025. As we said in our previous article, this country has never been more unhealthy. Discover your why so that you can eliminate excuses to being healthy. Sleep well, eat well, and drink your ionized water daily, and you will reach your goals.
