Friday, January 8, 2010

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?

7 comments:

  1. Hi there,
    I am starting a new diet program soon as well. I decided to try weight watchers and see how that goes. Just a quick comment to do with the losing 20% of your body weight in a year. I think they mean 20% of your entire body weight so 7.2% in a year would be for someone who is only 36Lbs (20% of 36= 7.2). So if you have 72 lbs to lose, close to what I have as well, I would assume your around 210Lbs? Depending on how tall you are, so your looking at more like 40Lbs in a year.
    I was thinking of starting a dieting blog as well, but I've started one before and didnt follow through. Maybe I'll just keep up with yours in stead of writing my own lol.
    Good luck,
    Katie

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  2. Hey Katie! Thanks for letting me know. I checked it out and you were right - there was a bit of a math mistake there.
    Hope you start your blog too and let us know how it goes. Best of luck!

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  3. So I made a great ham and bean soup for this new journey I'm on. I need to lose about 80 pounds to get to wedding weight. HA!

    So I'm really curious. If I cook ham bone in broth all day long, then refrigerate it, the next day I can pull all the fat off the top and I can then heat it into soup. (It's AMAZING how much fat you can pull off this way). But I'm curious how much fat really gets pulled off. Is the gelled broth under that fat considered fat free then? mmmmmm.....???

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  4. Gelling broth and them skimming off the fat is basically the ideal way to make homemade fat-free broth. That's right - fat-free! You have to be very careful to pull all of the fat off though. In fact, there is this thing called a gravy strainer to make your life a bit easier. Here's a picture of what it looks like:

    http://www.made-in-china.com/image/2f0j00KBmaVFZGCQRDM/Gravy-Separator-648-.jpg.

    As you can see, with the spout at the bottom of the cup you can just pour the bottom fat-free layer of the broth into a container and leave the fat in the cup hassle-free.

    Congratulations on the wedding by the way. Let us know how the weight loss goes.

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  5. About the broth, I forgot to mention that you should make sure to take the tiny chunks at the bottom out as well to really make it fat-free.

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  6. HA! I've been married 17 years YIKES! Just trying to get back TO that weight! :)

    The soup was DELICIOUS! Here is what I did. I cooked a whole chicken all day in the crock pot with spices and onions and celery. That night we ate the chicken, but I refrigerated the broth. The next morning I skimmed off the fat (A LOT) and added a little water and cooked a ham bone from Thanksgiving in it all day. Then I picked all the ham off the bone and added to the broth. Once again I refrigerated it. The next day I skimmed all the fat off (again, a lot) and heated the ham and broth through and added a can of black beans and a can of northern beans. It is VERY good! I figured the calorie count to be about 155 a cup. I figured the rest of the nutrition as well, but don't have it in front of me.

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  7. That soup sounds really good and it's great that it's only 155 calories. It must be really high in fibre too because of the beans.

    By the way, sorry about the confusion with the "wedding" weight. Ha, ha. Best of luck!

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