Time to Set Some Goals

As I mentioned before, I need to lose 72lbs. I was thinking that setting the personal goal of losing all this weight by the end the year was probably a good idea. After all, I don't want to make the same New Year's resolution next year. However, I wanted to know if this was a reasonable goal. So, I went through some of my class notes looking for anything related to weight loss and came accross a few recommendations:

1. Set REALISTIC goals. In other words, don't try to lose 72lbs in a month. It just won't happen and you'll just feel dissapointed and frustrated.

2. Try to lose no more than 20% of your body weight within a year. I don't know about all of you out there, but sounds quite achievable. That would mean I should be trying to lose about 38.4 lbs in a whole year. The main idea of setting such an achievable goal is that it is, well, achievable. This type of goal is reccomended for people who have been yo-yo dieting for a long time like myself. The reason being that yo-yo dieting is a cycle. You diet to the extreme (crash dieting) as an attempt to achieve unrealistic goals. Then, you obviuosly don't achieve such unrealist goals and, as a result, feel like a failure so you eat because dieting didn't work after all. This 10% weigh loss goal helps break the cycle. This means that you are very likely to lose 10% of your body weight in a year and probably even more. Thus, you feel like you successfully accomplished your goal and this feeling pushes you to keep going. Self-motivation is the key idea here.

3. Lose between 1-1.5% of your body weight per week. I think I like this one. That would mean that I should be losing between 1.9 and 2.9lbs per week. However, keep in mind that as you start weighing less, you should start losing less and less weight per week.

4. Keep the weight off for a year following weight loss. I don't think I'm going to make the goal of keeping the weight off before actually losing it but I wanted to post this recommendation for all you out there who have already lost the weight. In fact, keeping the weight off for a whole year decreases your chances of gaining it back by 50%. Yes, 50%!

Ok, so I think I will set recommendation 2 and 3 as goals for myself. How does that sound?

By the way, I am horribly sore from yesterday's and this morning's workout, but I guess it is a good kind of pain, right?