Introduction

Today I weigh 94kg, the highest I've ever weighed. This is not a good situation, obviously. I have a weight in mind - 66kg, which I was at for a year when I was 33 until I broke my arm, which caused a domino effect of gaining weight. Now, at age 45 I still want to be 66kg, and think I've figured out the way to achieve that. I've lost weight, put it on, wasted time, spent money on high protein foods, spent hours over the years running kilometres. All for seemingly nothing.

Looking at weight loss, some things become obvious. Almost all people can lose weight for a week. Some for a month, but very few people can lose weight for a year. I knew about my high school reunion - but what happened when I had 10 years to prepare for it? Nothing. I was still too heavy.

My motivation idea is simple, and based on one principle:

Most people can lose weight for something 4 days into the future.

My system is based on that simple principle. I have 3 motivations which will ideally help me lose weight:

Motivation 1: every week I am allowed (in fact I want to encourage myself) to go and see a film. But only if I weigh lower than I did the previous time I saw a film. If I don't weigh less, I can't go.

Motivation 2: every week I am allowed to go swimming (and again, I will try to encourage myself) but only if I am at a weight lower than the previous time I went swimming.

Motivation 3: when I buy coffee from the supermarket, I am only allowed to buy one bag and only if I weigh less than the previous time I bought coffee from the supermarket.

These 3 motivations are the foundation of this system, with the coffee one probably having the strongest effect on me. They were chosen based on something that I can enjoy and like to have, but I can go without them if possible.

These are good motivations, but together I don't think that they are enough. I need some others to help me as well, or else I'll just cruise along and not really bother, so I've got the two following motivations to speed things up:

Motivation 4: if I have not lost weight on a Monday compared to the previous Monday, I throw away a t-shirt/polo shirt. I do this until I have only 3 shirts left.

Motivation 5: I am only allowed a haircut at specific weights. If I don't achieve that weight, I can't get a haircut.

With these 5 motivations, I think I'll be successful at getting to goal. As to how long it will take me, I don't want to speculate. I've been burned so many times in the past, I don't want to create dates I'll know I'll miss. However, I've chosen a date which I think I'll be able to achieve goal by: 1st July 2012. I've chosen that date because it's roughly 1000 days away. I'm hoping that it'll be sooner than that, hopefully it will. I'll update this date as I feel ok about it coming closer.