Goal Setting Weight Loss Strategy

Yes, it's the journey, but it's also the destination.

One of the biggest reasons people don’t succeed with their weight loss goals is because they’ve set the wrong goals. They’ve taken the wrong approach to goal setting and weight loss.

The key to proper goal setting is two-fold:
Create an ideal goal. For example, "I want to lose fifty pounds."
Create smaller, achievable goals, to support that ideal goal. For example, I want to lose one pound a week. By the end of the year I will have lost 50 pound.


Now, losing one pound a week is much easier to manage and control. You can easily make changes to your lifestyle that support this smaller goal. Additionally, there’s a little wiggle room with this goal because there are 52 weeks in a year. That means there are two weeks where you don’t have to lose anything. And the weeks where you lose more than one pound will be bonus weeks. This helps avoid those Yo-Yo diets.

The key to proper goal setting is to create smaller goals that you know you can achieve. This accomplishes several important things:
It makes your goal more manageable
It helps you plan ahead
It helps you create a pattern of success. If you lose one pound a week for five weeks you’re going to be feeling pretty awesome. You’re going to feel motivated and successful. This will help you stay motivated. It’s a powerful feeling.


Lifestyle Goals

The weight loss goal is an easy goal. It’s a common one and it’s what most people think of when they’re creating a goal. However, as you move through the other habits/strategies in this report you’re going to want to set other goals.

For example, when you’re looking at your dietary habits you may want to stop drinking your calories. So your goal may be to eliminate soda from your diet. You can go cold turkey and quit drinking soda. However, many people find that the cravings and the habit is too engrained and the elimination is difficult. 

Instead, you could create smaller goals to support success. For example, your ideal goal would be to stop drinking soda completely in four weeks. If you normally drink three sodas a day you might first cut back to drinking one soda a day for the first week. The second week you drink half a soda a day. The third week you drink half a soda every other day. The fourth week you drink half a soda a week. By the end of the fourth week you’re done with soda and the process was relatively painless. This worked for me and they weight fell off fast.

You can also create goals to support exercise. For example, if you want to exercise for an hour a day five days a week. The first week you may exercise for ten minutes a day five days a week. The second week you may double that and workout for twenty minutes a day and so on. 

Or you may workout for fifteen minutes one day and then add two minutes to your workout until you reach an hour. But don't overdue it, exercise can become additive and work against you, just find the right balance.

Smaller, achievable goals help you create a pattern of success!

On our next weight loss strategy discussion, let's think about your ideal goal:

How can you break that goal apart into smaller, manageable goals you know you can achieve?