A 2025 study published in the International Journal of Obesity found that lack of motivation was the primary barrier to successful weight loss and maintenance, even more predictive than physical activity or eating habits. It found that participants who maintained motivation lost more weight and at a faster rate, stayed in treatment longer, and kept more weight off in maintenance. This is why cognitive behavioral coaching plays such an important role in helping individuals lose weight and keep it off long term.
In our work with clients, one of our most important goals is teaching them skills to stay motivated. In other words, we teach them how to do what they need to do to reach their goals whether or not they feel like it in the moment. We do this in part through cognitive restructuring, i.e. helping them identify and respond to thinking that prevents them from making decisions that are in line with their health goals.
A common sabotaging thought is, “This is too hard; I’ll never be able to make and sustain the changes I need to make to meet my goals.” We remind clients that while change is absolutely hard, it’s not impossible, and we ask them what other hard things they have accomplished in life.
We help clients break down the specific steps they need to take—and if any one step feels too hard or challenging, we break it down into even smaller steps. For example, if a client is trying to reduce the amount of dessert she’s eating, it may initially be too difficult for her to go from many sweets a day to just one. Together we figure out a step that feels doable, like cutting down from six or seven per day to five. After she masters five per day, we continue to shave off one per day until she reaches her goal.
Another common sabotaging thought is, “I don’t feel like doing [this] right now.” We help our clients remember that doing what they need to do is a decision, not a feeling. They likely do lots and lots of things every day that they don’t necessarily feel like, in the service of other important goals and values (like succeeding at work, taking care of their families, etc.) We help them learn that they can push past not feeling like it and do it anyway. We help them gather lots and lots of evidence that proves that when they do it anyway, they’re always very pleased after the fact that they did. We also help them gather evidence in the other direction: that when they don’t do it anyway and make decisions that aren’t in line with their goals and values, they regret it and ultimately wish they had.
Another impediment to maintaining motivation is when clients make mistakes. At these times, they often engage in self-defeating talk and may lose faith that they can ultimately be successful, which depletes their motivation. We work hard to prepare our clients in advance for the inevitability of making mistakes. We remind them that this is a skill-acquisition process like any other, and mistakes are unavoidable. No professional tennis player learned to play tennis without missing a ball– in fact, they continue to miss balls no matter how skilled at tennis they become. We help our clients figure out exactly what they will say to themselves once they do make a mistake to help remind them that mistakes are supposed to happen and they’re not a sign of failure or incompetence.
We have also found that helping our clients recognize and acknowledge every single sign of progress is essential for maintaining motivation. The process of losing weight can feel like taking three steps forward then two steps back (or even two and a half steps back!) It’s easy for our clients to only see the steps back and not even notice that they still maintained progress. Often we can see improvement even in mistakes. Maybe when they got off track it only lasted for two days instead of two weeks. Or when they had an emotional eating experience, they were able to interrupt it in middle and throw out half the carton of ice cream instead of eating the whole thing. These are two examples of success, not failure, because they objectively show progress! If clients are feeling unmotivated, chances are it’s because they are paying attention to the perceived mistakes they made and the decisions they weren’t happy about. They are failing to notice or they are discounting all the positive steps they took and all the things they did to bring them closer to their goals.
Maintaining motivation can be difficult, but through cognitive restructuring, preparing in advance for mistakes, and focusing on every single step forward, no matter how small it may be, clients can learn to do what they need to do consistently, whether or not they feel like it in the moment.
Reference:
Yang, H. W., De la Peña-Armada, R., Sun, H., Peng, Y. Q., Lo, M. T., Scheer, F. A., … & Garaulet, M. (2025). Uncovering key factors in weight loss effectiveness through machine learning. International Journal of Obesity, 1-11.