Exercise 101: Jump Start

Tips and tricks to put your eating and exercise program back on track

It was the night she went to the trouble of making brownies from scratch — so she could gorge on them instead of going to the store in search of a candy bar — that turned Lori Malkin's life around. She had little food in her cupboard (except baking chocolate), she was premenstrual and in a bad mood, and, well, who doesn't know the way that story usually ends?

"Afterward, I thought, This is ridiculous," Malkin says. "That was it. There were so few things in my life I had complete control over, but the one thing I could change was my body."

The next day she signed up for a step-aerobics class at the studio around the corner from her house in Ozone Park, New York, and started going twice a week. She also took up jazz dance and began eating sensibly. Over the next six months, her whole life shifted. She lost 20 pounds, joined a theater group (and got the first part she auditioned for), quit her job as a graphic artist with a publishing firm, went freelance, and fell in love. All because late one night, two and a half years ago, picking at the leftover crumbs of a brownie pan, Malkin somehow found the will to change.

At some point, almost everyone feels driven to do things differently. From Dale Carnegie to Deepak Chopra, from New Year's resolutions to birthdays with zeros in them, we have created celebrities and celebrations to spur us forward. With too little of such an urge — in cases of extreme depression, for example — we may be unable to eat or sleep. With too much, we wind up sounding like Richard Simmons — an option that is, believe it or not, healthier.

What Is Motivation?

"We use the term 'motivation' to mean drive," says Frank Farley, former president of the American Psychological Association (www.apa.org). "Without that particular instinct, as a species, we would die out. It has two main components: dynamism, or the impetus to do something, and direction, or the impetus to do one specific thing rather than another. But motivational triggers take many different forms: anxiety, thrill seeking, and the need to achieve, just to name a few."

Put more personally, some people are inspired to make changes after sinking as low as they feel they can go, and then saying, "Enough." Others can give themselves a kick in the pants simply by staring at an unflattering photograph or checking off boxes next to a list of exercises or contemplating the prospect of a promising evening out or fitting into a beloved pair of old blue jeans.

"If a person can look honestly at the choices she is making and realize that she has the option to do things differently, then she can often get herself motivated to change," says psychologist Peter Spevak, director of the Center for Applied Motivation. "But first you have to understand the significance of feeling bad or not fitting into your clothes. That discomfort, should you choose to acknowledge it, is what challenges you to question the status quo."

"How do you take that feeling of desperation and those short-term goals and turn them into a program?" asks Chris Imbo, co-owner of Casa, a fitness club in New York City. "You show people the pleasure of taking control of their lives." Trainers such as Imbo help clients define their goals, set up realistic schedules to achieve them, and act as one-man (or -woman) cheering sections.


What's In It For Me?

But the little private tricks most of us employ in pursuit of self-control are often as individual as our fingerprints. There is, for example, motivation that stems from the inducement of a reward. Lisa, a Manhattan writer, forbids herself to watch soap operas anywhere but at the gym. "The only reason I have a tight butt," she says, "is because I had to find out what was going on in the Nikolas Cassadine story line on General Hospital." Courtney, a Los Angeles stylist, keeps no breakfast food in her house specifically so that she has to take a three-mile walk to a café to eat her preferred fresh fruit and bagel. And though the power of love may move some to compose sonnets and spray-paint highway overpasses, it spurs others on to weigh skinless chicken breasts and board StairMasters.

Experts in fitness, nutrition, and psychology have found that although the appeal of living a healthier, longer life can get people to start exercising and eating properly, it is rarely strong enough to inspire them to keep up the regimen. Exercise motivation consultant Jay Kimiecik, a professor at Miami University in Oxford, Ohio, has found that long-term exercisers succeed where gym bingers fail because they focus on doing a physical activity largely for its own sake. In other words, it's the intrinsic benefits of enjoying what you do, focusing on a clear goal, and keeping track of both mind and body while you exercise that keep you going.

"I call it the what's-in-it-for-me approach," says Penny, a Miami advertising executive. "Sacrifice is so hard to sustain. I exercise because I love to eat and drink, and I'll only exercise in ways that I enjoy. Most mornings, I'm up at six, stoked to get out and walk for an hour or so by the ocean before breakfast. If I ever lived in a cold climate again — God forbid — I'd have to take up Latin dancing or martial arts or something else that's really fun."


Scare Tactics

Of course, there are other inducements. Dianne, a consultant living in Santa Monica, finds her large Airedale to be more demanding than a friend might be when it comes to forcing her to get out and walk. Beatrice, a Manhattan architect, finds that the buddy system works for dieting. "I'll go on a diet with someone in the office so I won't feel like the only one who's deprived. We'll even eat each other's brown-bag lunches to break up the monotony. And I'm competitive, so I want to be the one who's lost more weight by the end."

In moderation, that kind of competition can be healthy, but the genesis of other types of motivation is not always positive. Scare tactics, which seem particularly potent in the short-term, work as well. Cruel as it may sound, for Jennifer, a political aide in Washington, D.C., it's envisioning her own plump mother — naked — that gets her to the gym on time. Isabelle, an editor in East Hampton, New York, remembers a particularly unappetizing Buddhist tract that instructed fasting monks to "contemplate the remains of their stomachs" as being a useful dessert inhibitor. And Sara, a Chicago businesswoman, agrees to pay her assistant $1,000 whenever she goes off her diet or skips a workout. She's had to fork it over twice in the six years since initiating the persevere-or-pay plan. Find the best trainer in your neighborhood "Although some people respond to more positive forms of encouragement," says Manhattan diet guru Stephen Gullo "others, who may have failed a lot in the past, find pain a much more powerful motivator." Gullo has come up with a series of mantras his clients can use when they feel tempted. "I've studied what drives big eaters and tried to develop an alternative way of thinking. I tell them things like, 'Only the thin say, 'No, thank you.' And, 'Do you like it enough to wear it?' I appeal to the fact that certain foods and eating habits have not done well by them."


Seeing Results

Find out how others control their eating habits Visualization is another tool that helps some people literally to see their way through a diet or exercise program. "When we see something in our mind," says Henry Marsh, a former Olympic athlete and author of The Breakthrough Factor, "it becomes the script we live by." At the Casa fitness club in Manhattan, a giant map of Mount Everest is pinned on the wall to enable clients to visualize their progress, so that it isn't just the improvement of their own bodies that encourages them to keep working out but the sense of achievement they get as they move individual flags from camp to camp and ascend the mountain. "Each camp represents a short-term goal," explains trainer Jason Mittelman, the game's originator. "You have to accumulate points by running, biking, walking, or using the VersaClimber for a certain number of miles." (The real trick? Doing it without oxygen.)

Of course, if gearing up the first time to get fit or lose weight is difficult, then getting cracking after a relapse is an even bigger challenge. It's one that Marion, a film development executive in Los Angeles, had to face after gaining back a quarter of her initial 50-pound weight loss. "It's funny. I made mistakes the second time around that I didn't make before," she recalls. "A big one was that I went to the gym for the first time in a long time wearing the same workout clothes I'd worn when I was really in shape. And I saw myself jiggling and looking awful while everyone else was in their little thongs and exercise bras. I never wanted to go back there again. It was just too painful." The moral of the fable? "You've got to find clothes that make you feel good. I shop for the perfect sweatpants and T-shirt the way I do for a dinner party outfit."

In the end, Stephen Gullo finds we are motivated by the desire to look good, to feel in control, and to live healthier lives. "How we look has a lot to do with how happy we are," he says. "And studies have shown that how in control we are has a lot to do with how long we live." Happiness and longevity: They're probably worth a push-up or two.