About five years ago I was in the best shape of my life -- then I got involved in an abusive relationship and ended up gaining 40 pounds ... I would like to start working out again, but every time I try, I lose motivation, give up and become even more depressed.

It's not the task -- getting in shape and losing forty pounds -- that's defeating you. It's your perception of it.

You feel defeated because you've allowed yourself to feel the enormity of your full goal. That's exactly what most of us do when confronted with changing our bodies. What's interesting to me is that we often don't do it in other arenas of our lives.

For example, if you decide to have a child, do you consider the huge task of the next eighteen years, from the number of hours it will take each day to nurse her and watch after her while she's an infant to the amount of money it will take to send her to college? If you went to university, did you look at the whole four years and think of the number of books you'd have to read, the amount of material you need to learn, the number of tests you'd have to pass in order to get that degree? Most likely, you didn't.

So, if you're going to be successful in your current goal, you're going to have to do it the same way.

One pound at a time.

How to Be a Winner

Along the way, you will need to celebrate your successes rather than focus on what you perceive as failure. No one on the planet likes to continue an activity in which they always fail. That's why, when we undertake weight loss or body transformation, we need to trick ourselves into winning, at least until we're hooked.

It's like playing a game with a kid. You don't throw the ball too far or too hard or the kid will never catch it and will have a terrible time and give up. Instead, you "cheat" so that the kid can win. Once the kid gets good and loves the game, then you can make it harder.

Well, that's what you've got to do with yourself right now. You've got to treat your subconscious mind like that kid and "trick" it into winning.

Stay Motivated

How do you do that? Simple -- you set up goals that are preposterously, stupendously easy, things at which you cannot possibly fail. Maybe it's walking for one minute. Maybe it's doing three minutes on a treadmill. Maybe it's watching the first four minutes of a Tae-Bo tape from your living room couch.

Think that's silly? Think again. Remember that your subconscious doesn't evaluate big or little, it only knows success or failure. If you tell yourself you're going to do 30 minutes of aerobics and you only do 27, that's logged as a failure. Couple of those and you lose motivation and are out of the game. But if you tell yourself you're going to do three minutes, and you actually do them, it's recorded as a success. You leave the game a winner.

Now the trick is to do that every day. Why? So you can build up the habit of believing your own word. It does not matter what you do, it matters only that you do it. And that you do "it" successfully. That your subconscious scores it as a 'win.'

So set it up so that it's impossible to fail. Don't worry about it if the goal you set seems ridiculously easy. That's OK -- you'll be upping the bar soon enough. Remember that the prime goal here is not the amount of exercise you do or how "good" you are on your "diet"; the prime goal here is to develop a new habit -- doing what you say you're going to do.

So bypass the "no motivation" blockade by forgetting about the enormity of the goal. As you rack up your successes, your motivation will grow, the pounds will come off, and your body will change.