How To Create An Effective Weight Loss Goal

Does this sound like you?

You have set a goal for yourself to lose eight pounds, but after stepping on the scale you find out you have only lost six pounds even though you have been staying on track with your nutrition and exercise. Do you then go about your day feeling like you have failed your goal, even though you still achieved a six pound weight loss? Beautiful, this used to be my goal setting cycle. I’d create these goals and constantly not hit the numbers causing me to stop believing in myself to actually lose the weight and crushing my motivation to continue to eat healthy and be physically active. October’s Tip Of The Month is all about how to reformat your goals in order to use them to be actionable plans that are achievable and keep you motivated.

There are three main types of goals:

• outcome goals,
• performance goals,
• and progress goals.

A majority of us set outcome goals which are focused on the end result, such as “I want to lose eight pounds in one month.” The problem with outcome goals is that a majority of the time, they are not entirely in your control. For example, you may have eaten healthy and exercised consistently the entire month, but at the end of the month you have water retention from inflamed muscles or bloating which causes you to not hit that eight pound goal. Outcome goals should not be used when creating weight loss goals.

When creating weight loss goals, you should use performance and progress goals

because they are entirely in your control. Performance goals are focused on improving your own performance. An example of a weight loss performance goal could be to “eat more vegetables instead of saturated fat foods”. In this goal, you are evaluating your performance in increasing vegetables and lowering your intake of saturated fats. Progress goals are goals you set in order to achieve your performance goals. For example, using the performance goal of “eating more vegetables instead of saturated fat foods”, a progress goal to help achieve this goal could be to “replace two of my three cheese servings a day with vegetables”. It’s important that progress goals tie into the performance goal that you have set so set your performance goal first. Feel free to make one to three progress goals for a single performance goal.

Besides being entirely in your control, performance and progress goals are more beneficial because they help you create a plan on how you are specifically going to lose weight. By setting the performance and progress goals above, I know that my main focus is going to be on limiting my saturated fats and increasing my vegetable intake. By using performance and progress goals, you can create weight loss goals that will keep you motivated and seeing success! My advice is to set one performance goal (and up to three progress goals) at a time so that you do not feel overwhelmed. Please feel free to reach out to me at any time if you are struggling to create performance and progress goals for yourself by either scheduling a FREE consultation, emailing me at leanladiescoaching@gmail.com or calling me at 717-553-2299.