Eating and Living Healthy - What Inspires You?

Eating healthy and living a healthier lifestyle is important to me.  So is losing weight.  Because of this I have really been trying to pay attention to what motivates and inspires me as well as others.  Anything to help me get there is important.

SOCIAL NETWORKING AND MEDIA

Nowadays lots of people have found weight loss inspiration via social networking.  Via your smartphone you can log in and count your calories, log in your work outs, and check into your gym.  You can join weight loss communities, tweet pics of your work out and recruit workout support groups with members miles and even states away and of course you can share your goals and work via Facebook.

I love all of these things though I must admit I haven't partaken in any of them to a large extent other than My Fitness Pal.  I see though that the value is there.  When you share your fitness goals online you have even more accountability.  You also have an outlet to even more encouragement as you reach for your goals.  I will definitely take that kind of encouragement over the aggravation that I feel when I try on outfits at Goodwill (I don't do a lot of department stores).  I have decided to really invest more time with My Fitness Pal and also downloaded Fooducate.  I will see how these help me along before I go further in app land anyway.  :)

PEOPLE YOU KNOW

My co-worker gets inspiration from an old picture of himself from back in the day when he was substantially heavier.  It reminds him of where he was and keeps him on track to achieving his goals.  I get inspiration from him and from other friends.  Seeing them make better food choices, work out , and have success in weight loss causes me to want to make better decisions too.  I am also inspired by bloggers who are making strides in living a healthier lifestyle from women and men who are taking their first steps to those fitness gurus who seem to have it all together.  I love them all, and they do help.  Though really knowing someone and seeing them  face-to-face makes the biggest difference for me.

RANDOM

I get several fitness magazines, and I love the stories in there of women who have lost lots of weight and how they got there.  I love the exercise tips and I tear lots of sheets of these tips and stories and keep them in a binder.  I also love using my Pinterest account to get motivation.  Pinning motivation is pretty new for me.  Lastly random documentaries have inspired me as well.  I watched one that shared how pilots can't drink diet beverages before flying planes, It also shared how diet sodas contained what they called excitotoxins that kill off brain cells but it feels so good you just keep going.  That was all I needed to hear.  I stopped drinking diet sodas immediately, and I used to drink A LOT of diet soda.  That was about four months ago.

How about you?  How do you find your motivation to eat right and live healthy? I need all the tips I can get.