Help Your Patients Maintain Motivation

Motivation readily waxes and wanes. It’s both common and normal. We can help our patients by teaching them to nurture their motivation along. Motivation is often at its highest in the beginning of an individual’s weight loss or health management plan. This is the perfect time to create a Motivation Kit. Have your patients gather those things that remind them of the importance of their efforts. In a box or a notebook, they can collect photos, a list of reasons to lose weight or get healthier, magazine articles, motivational sayings – anything and everything that pumps them up. When they can’t remember why they need to keep up their efforts, it’s time to dig through that Motivation Kit. Here are ideas:

• Magazine article about people in the National Weight Control Registry
• People magazine - the issue about losing half your body weight
• List of reasons to lose weight including better blood glucose control, make my family proud, maybe take less medicine for diabetes, blood pressure, and cholesterol, etc.
• Wedding picture
• Photos of grandchildren
• Progress report including can cross my legs, sleep better, people tell me I look great,
• Exercise is more fun
• Motivational saying such as We can do anything we want as long as we stick to it long enough (Helen Keller)
• Lab reports

The above is not an actual one, but a compilation of several. The key though is that it must be personalized.By Jill Weisenberger, MS, RD, CDE