External Motivation

External motivation is motivation that comes from desiring some kind of reward - money, trophies, praise, etc.  Supposedly this motivation is not ideal, because once you get the reward (or fail to get it), the motivation is gone.  Then the behaviors that you were engaging in to reach the reward have no reason to continue.

I often have thought of myself as being easily motivated by outside forces.  Now I'm not so sure.  I was thinking about an incident last winter when my husband (in an effort to motivate me) offered me $1500 to lose 50 pounds by July 4, 2010.  Of course it's silly, because if I wanted $1500, I could just get it out of our joint account, right?  But it was going to be money I could just take guilt-free, no strings attached, to do with as I please.  It sounded good.  It sounded really, really good.  So I thought about it for a couple of weeks, and then I cut back on portion sizes for a few days, and I walked a little one morning.

Then I didn't.

And I didn't again.  And again.

July 4 came and went, and not only did I not lose that 50 pounds, but I had actually gained a little weight during that time.

External motivation didn't work that time.  So I'm now looking for my own internal motivation, but it's tricky.  It's hard to be motivated to lose weight and get healthy for its own sake, and not because I want to fit into smaller pants or have someone comment on the weight loss.  It's hard to exercise just because it feels good and makes my organs work better when the truth is that I'm trying to burn off calories to lose weight.  Where do we draw the line?  When does a little non-food reward cross the line into external motivation?

So I'm going to make an effort to switch my thinking and look for motivation from within.  However, I'm still going to do nice things for myself, and I will still look forward to those shiny little 5-pound stars at Weight Watchers too.