Detailed Goal Setting For Weight Loss

A Ship’s captain and an airline pilot have the same thing in common, before they even leave port they have a destination already set.

Before you embark on your program, you too need to have an end in mind. You need to have a destination, an arrival point. In other words, what weight will you finally arrive at?

Don’t take it as the weight you think you will look good at and just because you may have looked great at that weight as a teenager or when you were younger does not necessarily mean you will now.

The best thing to do when determining your goal weight is find a program that can calculate that for you. It takes several factors into consideration and will arrive at an average weight it feels you should be based upon your age and your height.

So, what weight should you be?

Find out here:

http://www.halls.md/ideal-weight/body.htm

Take your body measurements so that you can keep track of your progress. You never realize how far you really come until you know where you initially started. Keeping track of your measurements is a rock solid testament to your progress and gives you burning incentive to stick with it.

Here Is What Should Be Included In The Measurement

The Date: _____________________________

Height: _______________________________

Current Weight: ________________________

Bust (women): _________________________

Waist around the belly button: _____________

Hips: _________________________________

Thighs: _______________________________

Right upper arm: ________________________

Left upper arm: _________________________
Make sure that you purchase a notebook to keep tabs of your measurements. Don’t forget to re- measure yourself every month which will encourage you to stay focused on your goal.

As mentioned before, weigh yourself every two weeks, once a week at the very most to avoid becoming discouraged with the natural weight fluctuations as your body begins to change and transform.

The other great thing about goal setting is that not only do you have a real purpose and you are solidifying and materializing those dreams into reality but it also gives you achievable steps to attain it. Think of it as a blueprint to your weight loss.

Which would keep you motivated longer?

I will lose 100 pounds in 12 months of which I will be at my goal weight of 120 pounds.

Or…

By December 31st 2009 I will weigh 120 pounds. My current weight is 220 pounds therefore I need to lose 100 pounds.
To achieve my goal of a 100 pound weight loss I will need to lose at least 2 pounds per week for the next 12 months.

Then create mini weight loss goals which will eventually contribute to the overall weight loss goal of 100 pounds because how do you eat an elephant?, one bite at a time.

How do you achieve such an overwhelming amount of weight loss?, one pound at a time. It is these small, simple, unglamorous steps that add up to the life changing 100 pound goal.

Get very detailed and specific.

So if you started your program on January 1st, by January the 8th you would have lost 2 pounds with your new weight being 218 pounds.

By January the 15th you should weigh 216 pounds

January the 22nd your weight will now be 214 pounds

January the 29th you will now weigh 212 pounds

See what I mean? It’s more realistic to break your overall goal into achievable little bite sizes so that you can see your progress and where you are headed. You appreciate that these little mini achievements add up to a your overall goal.

Doing it this way makes it doable and removes the pressure from having to lose 100 pounds now like most of those fad diets would have you believe.

You set yourself up for failure when you see you’ve only lost 2 pounds in your first week because you have that huge monumental goal in mind, never mind the fact that weight loss is just a collective of little weight loss successes that form the overall bigger picture.

Knowing that massive success with weight loss comes in little steps as you will know that with each pound you lose.

If you half kill yourself with punishing calorie restriction and excess exercise and find yourself losing over 5 pounds per week, just remember that most of that weight will be water and some desperately needed lean muscle tissue. That means that all of it will return almost overnight. So stick with a realistic, healthy, permanent 1 to 2 pound per week weight loss.

Watching What You Eat – Keeping Tabs On Those Calories

What Exactly Is a Calorie?

Before we start what exactly are calories? You hear that word touted around loosely on so many diets but what exactly are calories and why is important that you keep track of them?

All a calorie is is a measure of heat energy. One calorie is the amount of energy being required to raise the temperature of a gram of water by one degree Celsius. Calories are found in fats, proteins, carbohydrates or alcohol so pretty much everything except water.

A gram of carbohydrates contains 3.75 calories
A gram of fat contains 9 calories
A gram of protein contains 4 calories
A gram of alcohol contains 7 calories

You can see from the above figures that it’s easy to gain weight from consuming foods high in fat and drinking too much alcohol as they are laden with more calories than protein or carbohydrates.
Monitoring Your Calories

Up to this point you know how important diet and exercise are with respect to your weight loss. You know that to lose weight you have to eat. Severely restricting your calories to crash diet levels won’t only hinder your weight loss effort but it will damage your body in the process.

You have also learned that when you deprive the body of food it will feed off itself for survival including burning precious muscle tissue which alarmingly also includes the heart. This is why some dieters on extreme calorie restriction diets often die of heart failure because the heart has been broken down and weakened. So please don’t shock your body by starving it.

The approach you should be taking is from a scientific standpoint, don’t worry anyone can do this and you certainly don’t have to be a doctor to understand it.

Make sure you eat from all food groups but eat smaller meals, say 5 to 6 meals per day to keep your energy levels balanced. When we severely restrict calories we jump start our set point to kick in and make us eat. So to avoid that evolutionary mechanism response we need to work in alignment with our body and feed it good food, and frequently. Your body won’t think that it’s being starved or deprived and it will allow you to lose the weight.

So how can we lose weight by eating? By monitoring our caloric intake. Did you know that if you can create a 500 calorie deficit every day from just your diet and exercise that you will be able to lose around a pound of fat per week?

A pound is great, it doesn’t sound like much however remember how I mentioned before that volume for volume fat by far takes up more room than muscle tissue. That means that every pound you lose you are losing bulk and rolls from your body. This is why that even if you lose 3 pounds of fat that you notice your clothes getting looser because even though muscle is heavier than fat, fat actually occupies more space than muscle does. Keep that in mind when you weigh yourself. The scale isn’t always an accurate reflection of your true fat loss.

The Number Of Calories You Consume

Every food you consume has a caloric value associated with it.

To really lose weight you need to create a deficit of calories every day. For example, if you eliminate 250 calories less each day from your diet either by eating a little less or by removing high sugar, high fat foods from your diet and you exercise and burn off 250 extra calories per day you can lose up to 3,500 calories per week which totals one pound of fat lost.

To do that you have to be burning 500 extra calories per day. This is 500 calories over and above what you are eating. If you simply burn off what you eat you are maintaining your weight level. If you are burning over and above what you are consuming then you begin to burn your excess fat stores.

To lose 2 pounds per week you simply double the amount of daily exercise you do and eat more lean, healthy foods.

How Many Calories Should You Consume A Day?
Women should consume no less than 1,200 calories per day to ensure weight loss and that they are receiving the balanced diet they need.

Men on the other hand should consume no less than 1,800 calories per day to lose weight.

To determine accurately the number of calories you should be getting in your daily diet use this handy tool to calculate yours:

http://www.dietblog.com/archives/2005/12/26/how_to_calculate_your_daily_calorie_needs.php

Remember the more lean muscle mass you have the better. If you decide to go below the recommended calorie amount for a balanced diet then you will be losing precious muscle tissue which is instrumental in the burning of fat. Don’t forget that the more lean muscle tissue you have the better your body at losing weight.

You will not experience permanent, sustained weight loss by eating too little but you will also run the risk of slowing your metabolism to the pace of a snail. Anyone who’s been on restrictive calorie diets in the past will know that it is difficult to exercise when you simply don’t have the energy to do so. So the key here is to make sure that you consume enough calories to have lots of energy and to enjoy life while losing weight at the same time. It’s all about balance.