Set Realistic Weight Loss Goals
Welcome back to one more of my Top 100 weight loss tips. This post comes in at article number 4 in the series of tips that gives you everything you need to help you lose weight.
This post takes a look at the goals you set for losing weight and how by setting realistic ones, you vastly improve your chances of achieving them as well as making it far more certain that you will not feel like giving up part way through the program.
Weight Loss Goals
It's a well known fact that when you set unrealistic goals in any area of your life, you are going to at best struggle to achieve them. But what's more worrying is that you are far more likely to fail to achieve them or even make a partial achievement.
This is because we're programmed to take things one step at a time. That means that by taking one step and completing it successfully, we are then able to easily go on to take the next step and so on and so forth.
The same thing applies to losing weight. It's an awful thing to be confronted by a massive goal that seems way to impossible to attain, yet so many people do exactly that when they set about putting themselves on a weight loss diet plan of some kind and set themselves the goal of losing a huge amount of weight in a relatively short space of time.
As a hypnotherapist, I see this kind of thing all the time with clients who come to me and want to lose weight but can't believe they failed to lose anything even though they had set themselves the target to lose say 20 pounds in four weeks or even to lose 10 pounds in 10 days.
Is It Achievable for Real?
That might seem achievable on paper, but when you confront it head on, it seems like a massive mountain to scale. So what often happens is that people with that kind of goal to aim for they give up almost before they even get started. It's natural to feel that way because no one wants to take on a huge undertaking.
It's far easier to break something down like that into smaller chunks that are more readily acceptable. When you set a goal to lose, say six pounds in four weeks, that's much more doable because it only means dropping one and a half pounds each week. That's very achievable and when faced with something that seems easy to do, people are far more likely to do it.
So if you're setting yourself a goal that you feel is too great and you feel maybe you are going to struggle to achieve it, the best thing to do is to halve that goal. Then reassess your chances of making it work.
If it still seems too much to handle, then halve it again! You'll get to a stage where you will have a much lower aim that you know you can achieve without knocking yourself out, and you'll surprise yourself by doing it with ease. Then just set the same goal again and get to working on that afterwards.
After all, there really isn't an authoritarian time limit on how fast you should lose weight. It's personal and it must be something you know you can do for yourself.
100 Weight Loss Tips number 3 follows in the next post!
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Posted on Sat, 12 Dec 2009 in Top 100 Weight Loss Tips | 1 Comments
1 thoughts on "Set Realistic Weight Loss Goals"
Isac Mathez says:
Thank you for the post on setting realistic goals to lose weight. I will want to try working in this way from now on as before I was guilty of trying to achieve goals that were far too high to actually be achievable. Thanks you for your insights.