Most extremely successful people are goal setters. It’s common sense, that we should all set goals for ourselves…but how we set them and how we treat them can make all the difference.

What is the difference between the following goals:

- This year I’m going to lose weight!
- I’m going to lose 30 pounds this month!
- By the summer, I’m going to be in the best shape I’ve ever been in my life!

At first glance, these are all very similar goals, right? Not exactly, from what we’ve seen.

The problem with “This year I’m going to lose weight”, is that there are no specifics. While it’s good not to kill yourself to live up to the numbers on the scale within a specific time, having very vague goals lead to unsatisfactory results (most often). This is because there is nothing that drives us to do the right things each day, because we always have tomorrow. Ultimately, we will adjust our goal in our minds to match what we want to do next. So, to make ourselves accept our own actions, we allow ourselves to push our goals out and make them less demanding. That extra piece of cheesecake won’t matter this week, since we’re going to lose our weight starting the following week, or month even.

Ultimately, we’ll find ourselves at the end of the year, facing the Thanksgiving and December holidays, with little hope of accomplishing our goal.

Now, “I’m going to lose 30 pounds this month”, is a bit too unrealistic. This is OK, but often in the weight loss game, it is important to know what is possible, and what is not, and how it relates to what we need to do to get there. So, while aggressive goals are great, sometimes we need to understand how possible they are. The only way to do this is to do a little bit of research. (We have done this for you).

“By the summer, I’m going to be in the best shape I’ve ever been in my life!” is a great goal. However, it needs a bit of fine tuning. Being able to visualize where and when you want be at your goal is important. It’s also good to set some numbers around that. Often we don’t know what these should be. So as a general rule, we might set a 1-3 pound per week goal and see where that leads us within our allotted timeframe.

So from our experience, we outline what is feasible, from the conservative to the agressive. By all means, don’t be afraid to be aggressive in your goal setting (the next step is understanding what it takes to get there):

1-3 pounds per week or 4-12 pounds per month.
12-36 pounds in 3 months (12 weeks)
24-72 pounds in 6 months

On the conservative side, we see it is very possible to lose 24 pounds in 6 months, or nearly 50 pounds in one year. Seems pretty good, right? 1 pound per week? Maybe that doesn’t excite you. On the other hand, losing 72 pounds in 6 months sounds incredible (for those with that much weight to lose) – sounds far fetched, almost too good to be true? Not really.

So at the end of the day, if you have 70-100 pounds to lose to get to a healthy weight, before the year is over, you can easily do it. (now taking my word for it may be the hard part.)

Goals, need to have a time wrapped around them. It’s ok to have multiple long, medium, and short-term. What else?

We should be able to measure them to some degree, so we can see where we are in relation to them.
They should get us pretty excited, and shouldn’t be arbitrary. We need to feel an emotional connection to them.
They can coincide with an event (birthday, wedding, reunion). Why? Because it keeps us a little more focused.

So what’s your goal?