Setting Weight Loss Goals
Setting weight loss goals comes in many forms, and can effect a person in different ways. There is a problem today among those who want to shed excess weight when they embark on their weight loss journey. This problem is not a lack of motivation, but a lack of sustained motivation due to poor goal setting at the beginning in changing their eating habits. This is quite apparent by all of the fad diets on the market, and all of the different celebrity weight loss tricks. In today’s society everyone wants weight loss satisfaction as fast as they can get a burger at the downtown burger drive through.
Many individuals think they can lose twenty pounds a week, and lose one hundred pounds in a month or two. When a person starts a low calorie diet, and expects to lose a huge amount of weight, this will always lead to failure. A large factor in this failure is that a person begins to feel defeated after a few weeks, when the weight does not fall to the floor in chunks. People lose touch when they begin a weight loss regiment, with ill conceived ideas of what they believe to be the reality of weight loss.
In my own reality I started to diet when I was almost 100 pounds overweight. Now after almost 4 months I have lost 21 pounds. This can be depressing, because it is not more. I have learned that in the reality of living in a world of poor eating, losing weight can, and is difficult. I feel as if I should be losing more, and more at a faster rate. The sad reality is that the longer I attempt to lose weight the harder it becomes to lose more weight. I have learned to realize that the weight is harder to shed because of the forces I set in motion at the outset of my journey to lose the pounds. I now realize that my initial goals were unrealistic, and did not account for the funerals or the parties, or the nights out. I have learned I do not live in a dieting vacuum, and that my goals were depressing me, and not the weight that I did not shed.
I now realize that I am not on a “diet”, I have changed my lifestyle, and attitude towards eating. It took me many years to gain the weight, and it is okay to lose the weight in more than a year. I have come to realize that my problem of feeling a failure was not due to lack of motivation, or fortitude. It is because four months ago, I created goals of weight loss that needed to be adjusted, and were not. I have come to realize that it is okay to loose weight slowly, and that as long as my weekly seven day average is trending downward, I am fine. I only wish I would have been more conscious of goal setting from the beginning. If I would have been better and more realistic at goal setting I would not have had to suffer through the feelings that I was once again a diet failure. I now realize how important realistic weight loss goals really are in the reality of day to day living.