“Be proud of yourself for taking action, getting out of your comfort zones, and getting closer to the life of your dreams. It’s your life and doing the right thing is more important than what other people think or say about you.”

-Craig Ballantyne

Hope you’re having a great day!

Yesterday I was talking to a new client.

She told me how excited she was when she first got home from her first workout.

She felt great. She felt energized and she wanted to tell her friends on Facebook.

But she stopped herself.

She didn’t want to be one of those people that starts a program tells everyone about it and then stops.

She then told me how critical her husband had always been of her weight, yet not really supportive of her efforts to lose it either.

And every time she’d made progress in the past he’d be the first to remind her how likely it was she’d fail again.

That’s when I was reminded of one important fact of social support.

While every piece of research ever done on weight loss and social support has proven that:

THE MORE SUPPORT YOU HAVE THE MORE WEIGHT YOU WILL LOSE FASTER AND KEEP IT OFF LONGER.

But…

You need to not just tell people.

You need to tell the RIGHT PEOPLE….

You need to tell people that you know have your best interests at heart.

That will remain positive and supportive of your efforts to make changes in your life, even when you’re not so sure yourself that you can make it.

There are really two approaches to social support and they both work.

You can do as our VIP Client Nikki Scott did. She started out at 240lbs and knowing she needed to make some huge changes and save her own life for herself and her family.

She wrote out her story and goals and took before pictures of herself at 240lbs and posted them on her blog.

You can see her amazing results here yourself.

This is what you call the “burning the boats” method of social support. There’s no going back and even if you did want to go back you can’t…

Nikki has lost over 50lbs and telling the whole world what she was going to do I think has a lot to do with keeping her on track.

I believe this would be good if more people did this, but few will have the guts.

The second method and the more common is selective social support.

You’ve still got to let some people know what you’re doing but they’ve got to be the right people.

Like I said earlier, a person that will back you up, even when you don’t believe in yourself.

Your mother, a spouse, a sibling, your best friend. Even co-workers will do really well. As long as you recognize you’re going to need to get yourself some support.

Because, quite often, like my new client, you’re not going to get it at home.

When you get to the office at 8:30am, after getting up at 4:30am to workout, they’re not clapping for you.

It’s up to you to find that one or two people that you know that will back you.

You NEED to find at least one or two people you can trust with your goals and tell them. “Hey, I’ve really let this weight thing get away from me and I’m going to be making some changes to what I’m eating and doing the next few weeks, I hope you’ll support me.”

Find those positive people and enlist their assistance.

You’ll need them to pick you up when you’ve got knocked down.

And you will get knocked down at some point.

And cheer you on when you’ve hit a new goal…

If you can’t think of a single person to enlist. Research has even shown that online support will help increase your success.

You can get connected to other like minded people through Facebook or Sparkpeople.

And just like Craig Ballyntine said earlier and an important key to remember… “It’s your life and doing the right thing is more important than what other people think or say about you.”

I believe in you.

It CAN be done and YOU can do it!

Talk soon.

Dave