As everybody knows, this is the time of year we set our weight loss goals for the year. If you are as serious about getting the weight off as I am, think of goal setting as making a contract with yourself, a very important contract.

There are a few posts around the TDC, like "I want to lose 100 lbs this year", or "I want to lose 50 lbs by May 1st" and so on. But ask yourself, are these REALLY reasonable goals? Is this a contract you can keep? I don't think there is any more discouraging feeling during a diet than falling behind your goal. Maybe there are mitagating circumstances, a birthday party, or a vacation. These things should be included in your goal.

And for those people around the TDC who have lost 50-75-100+ pounds, is losing 100 lbs in a year a realistic goal, or are you setting yourself up for failure? Is it a contract you can't fullfill?

To use myself as an example. First, I'm a guy, so I lose reasonably fast. Second, I exercised over 300 times in 2003, each time over 45 minutes. Thats over 500 miles of walking, and hundreds of thousands of pounds lifted. My eating plan was excellent. I was laid off my job in January, and during the discussion about how bad the economy was, and they had to cut heads blah-blah-blah, the only thing I thought about was that I could now exercise twice a day and tighten up the food plan even more, so I practically ran out of there with a smile on my face (got a new gig 3 weeks later though), so I was 100% focused. For all that effort, I lost 57 lbs. Was I happy? Yes, I was estatic because my goal after losing 49 lbs in 2002 was to lose another 35 last year which was a reasonable goal. I don't think I could have put forth a better effort. As a result, I am under 300 lbs for the first time in almost 20 years.

On the other hand, if my goal was to lose 100 lbs, I would have been very disappointed, and probably would have quit yet again.

Because you are posting in the TDC, you have a lot of weight you want to lose. And it takes time, a great deal of it. If you can consistantly lead a life of high quality and lose 1 pound a week, you will win. If you can be a good person in your community and lose 1/2 pound a week, you will win. If you are a good parent and friend to those around you and lose 1/4 pound a week, you will win. The race is long and demanding. Time is your friend, not your enemy. Like Mr. E said in another thread, he could be 55 years of age at 400 lbs, or 55 years of age at 250 lbs. If you lose only 20 lbs per year, in 5 years thats 100 lbs....a great accomplishment.

Please choose your goals wisely. The forum is stronger because of your presence, and you never know, you might be the difference in someone else seeing the light at the end of the tunnel.

Good luck in 2004 everyone!

Thanks for that thread, Jerry! It is so true that many of us set unrealistic goals (I am guilty of it myself) and then become so discouraged when we don't make them that we give up and lose all the progress we worked so hard to make. I would LOVE to lose 100lbs by Jan 1st 2005 BUT I am not making that my 'goal'. My 'goal' is to be under 200 lbs and be in better shape. I am 40lbs away from the under 200 mark. I think 40lbs is a very reasonable goal for 12 months. I think with a lot of work and commitment on my part, I should far exceed that goal of 40lbs - but if I don't I will still be happy just to be under 200lbs and if I do, it will just be even more motivation and encouragement to keep on trucking towards my long-term goal of reaching 130 - 135lbs. I know eventually I will get to my goal, even if it takes two years or longer. I have made that decision. I can be over 200lbs , two years from now, or I can be under and much more healthy and fit. I am going with the latter....

Amber

Very good thread, Jerry.

I, too, have been thinking about goals and resolutions. While losing 100 lbs. in 2004 may be something I would dearly love to achieve, I am going to focus more on working the plan 100% a day, rather than losing "x" amount of pounds within a period of time. That way, perhaps I just may achieve that 100 lb. loss in a year. If not, I'll know I did everything in my power and my body will have lost what it needed to lose in that time frame. Regardless, though this journey is a long one, it is one that needs to be lived daily and that is what I intend to do. So, my only goal this year is to live the plan for one day, every day, and let tomorrow take care of itself. Tomorrow.

Erin

I've found for myself that I set a reasonable goal to be cheat free from day to day and have purposely not set any pound specific goals to avoid disappointment. That way I am not so overwhelmed with the large numbers overall that I have to lose, yet can pat myself on the back each day that I have stuck with the WOE. This has been a much different experience from Weight Watchers and other plans I've tried where the focus seems to always be on the number of pounds lost each week.

What a GREAT post, Jerry!!!! I think it should be a posty for all of those beginning and could be titled, "How Not to Set Yourself Up for Failure!!!" It's this kind of thinking that's making the difference for me this time....

Jerry - this is an excellent post. I have found that I sometimes fall into the trap of wanting to lose x pounds by y date and I do well, I lose weight, stick to plan, etc but don't meet the x goal. Then I tend to gain weight because I'm pissed off. With that said, I'm still going to set a target for the year but I plan to use it more for monitoring myself against my planned way of eating and exercising, not to compare my weight loss to others - which can also be upsetting. I agree with others, I'm going to get through this year one successful day at a time - which should include weight loss.

When I set goals for this way of eating, it is not how many pounds I will lose. It is how many carbs per day I will eat, or how much exercise I will get. A goal should be something that you can achieve by controlling what you do. We can't truly control how much weight we lose in a day or a week or a month. But we can control other things.

I take the perspective that if I control the carbs, then the weight loss and smaller size clothing are my rewards. It's really a change in perspective and can make all the difference in the world in whether you perceive yourself as successful or not.

Also goals should be based on facts. If you've been eating low carb for a while, then you should be able to look at how many carbs you've been eating and set yourself some realistic goals. If you are new to this way of eating, you should review what others are doing and combine that with what you know about yourself and what you've read in the low carb books to set your goals.

When I first started eating lower carbs (note that I'm not following Atkins, per se, but am just doing my own low carb plan), I first tracked how many carbs a day I was eating. I did that for only 2 days and said WHOA! I was way over 200 carbs per day and I hadn't even pigged out on those 2 days like I had normally done. So rather than track them for the week as I had planned, I decided right then and there to lower my carbs per day to 150. (I didn't know much about this WOE at that time or I would have gone even lower!)

Lowering them to 150 was good and I followed that for 3-4 weeks. I lost weight, but still ate some of those "no-no" foods. There were a few days when I ate less than 150 and I saw that I lost faster then, so I dropped my goal to 100 carbs per day. It worked even better, so after about a month, I dropped my goal to 70 carbs per day. Then I noticed that when I was below 70, I easily lost weight. When I was higher than 70 I didn't lose weight quite so easily. So 70 was the most carbs I could eat. These days, though, I eat anywhere from 25-50 carbs per day (rarely higher), but I still keep 70 as my upper limit.

And the only reason I was able to learn this about myself was by setting my goals and tracking them. I think a lot of people forget about the tracking part. If you don't track, then you won't know if you've met your goal. I used Fitday.com to track my food intake each and every day for 3 months. It was well worth all the time I spent on it!

Do I dream of losing 100 lbs in a year? You betcha! I suspect we all do! But I won't be setting that as a goal!

I have also been reading the posts from people who say, "I plan to lose 120 pounds this year" or "I plan to lose 100 pounds this year" and I have been deliberately not replying to them because I have learned that there is really nothing I can say. The posts make me somewhat sad, because I know that most of these people are going to get rapidly discouraged and most of them will not be here in another month or two.

There are people on this forum who have lost 100 pounds or more in a year. A couple that come to mind are Chemlady and ItstheWoo. However, they are definitely the exceptions and I think it is a mistake for other people to expect to follow the same weight loss pattern. In my opinion, it is better to have lower expectations and be pleasantly surprised if you exceed your expectations, rather than set extremely high expectations that you have a very small chance of meeting. We can control what we eat and how much we exercise; we can't control how fast our bodies lose weight. The rate at which our bodies lose weight is dependent upon a lot of things -- our age, our past history of dieting, the amount of weight we need to lose, our emotional state (I find that my body holds onto weight during periods of stress and from what I have read there are hormonal reasons for this), other health conditions we may have, etc.

My first five or six months low carbing I lost about 50 pounds. During the next year, I lost another 50 pounds. I have it in the back of my head that I will be very happy if I lose 40 pounds during 2004, because that will put me in a position where I can hope to reach my goal weight in 2005. I'm sure I'll lose slower in 2004 than I did in 2003 because I have less weight to lose and because I have been low carbing longer. If I don't lose the 40 pounds and I lose 20 pounds or 30 pounds in 2004, I will still be happy because I will finish up the year lighter than I started it. I get healthier and more energetic with each lost pound, so it's not like I need to get all the way to my goal weight to realize the benefits of eating this way. I think we need to learn to appreciate and celebrate how far we have come, rather than focusing on how far we have left to go. I weighed about 50 pounds less on January 1, 2003 than I did on January 1, 2002; and about 50 pounds less on January 1, 2004 than I did on January 1, 2003; how many people can say that? No, I didn't lose 100 pounds in a year, but I have lost 100 pounds total.

There are two woman who joined this forum about a year go that I will never forget. The first woman had very ambitious goals for how much weight she was going to lose and how fast she was going to lose it. She really pushed herself with regard to both exercise and eating -- severely limiting her calories while exercising for large periods of time each day. She definitely treated this like a diet, not a way of eating. We had a few exchanges in her journal about this, but she insisted that she had to lose the weight quickly and this was the only way she could do it. She was reasonably young (I'd guess 30-ish) and lost a lot of weight very rapidly (on the order of 50 pounds). People on the forum were very admiring of her. If you read her journal, there were lots of posts from people who wanted to know how she did it because they wanted to do the same thing. She disappeared one day, then came back a month or two later and wrote a post about how she had eaten a few carbs one day, gotten totally off track, and was now 20 or so pounds heavier than she had been. She posted a few more times and then disappeared again. My guess is that she could never get back on track. Because she was treating this like a diet, instead of a way of eating, she was unable to sustain what she was doing. She was racing so fast toward her goal that when she fell down she was overwhelmed and couldn't get up.

The second woman who I can't forget joined the TDC also about a year ago, and insisted that she had to lose weight very rapidly because losing weight was going to change her life. I tried to gently give her some advice in response to a question she asked in the TDC and she told me that losing a pound a week might be acceptable to me, but it was unacceptable to her, so she wasn't going to take my advice. She disappeared after a few weeks and then reappeared a couple months ago in the TDC, weighing more than she did the first time she was here, and again posting that she was desperate, needed support, and had to lose all the weight immediately. Once again, she disappeared after a week or so and I am sure that she did not manage to lose any weight during 2003.

I am pretty sure that neither of these women was as successful as I was last year, even thought their goals were much more ambitious than mine. It's not your goals that matter, it's your actions. We need to focus on doing this one day at a time and celebrate each lost pound that doesn't come back. Those pounds do add up over time!

I know what you're saying. I averaged 13 pounds a month until December, which slowed my loss quite a lot, even though I stayed on-plan. Part of me was jealous of a friend who has lost 80 pounds and continues to average 2.9 pounds per week loss. Another part of me, the pragmatic part, won the debate.

Pragmatic Scott said: You're still losing. You're not gaining. What's the problem here?

Dreamer Scott said: Bullshit. We're not losing it fast enough. We'll still be fat next Christmas.

Pragmatic Scott: So what? We have had 30 or so fat Christmases so far. What is another, especially if we're less fat than before. Endure another one, maybe two. No problemo.

Because his viewpoint is inevitably correct, Pragmatic Scott won that debate. Where was the Dreamer going to go with it? Quit the diet because it isn't effortless? Go back to having pizza and cinammon rolls because the diet isn't working as fast as he'd like? Oh, that's logical.

I sat my goals without a true timeframe, other than a misguided Christmas goal that I came close to hitting anyway. I want to be more or less to goal before Kyra gets to the age when she'll need a thin dad to play and run with her, and that's a couple years off. I can do that, even at a pound a week or less.

I do want to buy clothes that aren't in the Big & Tall section by this summer, and that seems reasonable. I'm already feeling my 2X shirts kind of hang down, and my 3X's are positively huge.

Goals are goals: they should be specific and attainable and within our control. I'd urge everyone to have them, but to also have dreams. Goals are something you should get done. Dreams are something that should drive you and unify your actions.

My goal is that my daughter won't remember a fat dad. I can definitely do that. My dream is that she has him around for a very long time. I can't control that, but I can damn well work at it.

Scott

I "want" to lose75 lbs this year, a total of 115 lbs to reach my ultimate goal. However, I actually have 25 lb goals. My husband said to pick a reward for every 25 lbs I lose. So, those are my goals. I lose 25 and get to go to the salon for a pedicure, manicure, and facial...so on and so on for every 25 lbs.
Will I be disappointed if I don't get 75 off this year? Hell no! If I only get 30 off, that's 30 that is gone for good. I don't really mind if it takes longer, I am just setting those goals so I force myself to work harder.

yea.. I appreciate the posts you all have made..they were very well thought out. I am going to try to change my way of thinking to be like Tedmom mentioned...where I just try to get through each day day by day...it's somethign very difficult for me..I tend to lose 10 pounds then go way off plan for days before getting back on...its not like I go order a pizza but more like eat 1 french friy when I give my kids their and all of these litt thing ad up and I have a bad dinner and the next day I try HARD to stay on plan but have that 1 bad thing and it gets me again... I swear I repeat this pattern so often and I feel defeated and angry that I cant just go cheat free day after day and month after month. I KNOW I would do better if I didnt have ot make and serve all of my old favorite to my husband and kids but thats something I will have to learn to live with obviously.

I will be aiming at 75 for the year but I know darn well that I could lose more if I apply myself each day...but I also could lose 50 for the year...At this time next year I hope to be sitting here replying once again to someone in the TDC and if I have only lost 50 more pounds in 2004 I know I will be okay with that! I am pretty sure I will reach my goal in 2005..not sure at what point in 05 but I do think it's reasonable that I will get there that year...probably not this year just seems like an impractical goal that would make me want to quit if I expect it.

Try one HOUR cheat free, wenzday....I used to use that when I was on W.W....I took a chart with the hours blocked off and I'd darken all of the ones I was cheat free... you'll be amazed how much it helps

When I read about people who want to be at goal TOMORROW (and I'm one of them sometimes) I often think of the fact that it will be just as difficult--perhaps more difficult!--to maintain the weight loss than to keep losing. I can even imagine having nostalgia for the days when eating less and exercising more meant seeing a loss on the scale, rather than hoping "only" to maintain. Losing is exciting...will maintenance be?

There has been a great deal of wisdom shared in this thread...not much I can add.

However, what is "realistic" for one person may be different for someone else. For ME (and your mileage may/will vary), a 95 pound loss in a year is not only realistic but medically sound IF I FOLLOW THE BASICS of any reasonable weight loss program.

How so? Hmmm. I have gone from a point of basically NO exercise last May to some limited exercise now. If I simply do a reasonable low carb food program (which I will) and do a minimum of 20 minutes of cardio a day (which I will) and some basic weight training (which I do)...the mathmatics of calories in vs calories burned compared against those needed to maintain my end of year goal weight point to this being a realistic goal FOR ME.

I am 53. I am not very active. I do follow a fairly sensible low carb program...one which I can follow easily over the course of a year...including celebrations, parties and the like.

So...setting reasonable goals: my food program is certainly doable. Due to old war wounds from 1969, I will never be able to do as much (pain-free) exercise as most...but it is in the exercise area in which my ability to meet my goal will be found. No. I don't have to do any ungodly regieme of exercise. I do, however, have to do the basics of my exercise program consistantly. I do have to grow with my program as I lose weight and am better able to carry my butt around on battered legs.

I figure I am worth it.

But I do agree wholeheartly that each person should set reasonable goals for themselves and what they know to be realistic and achievable. I do not think ANY person should shortchange themselves, however. Do what you KNOW is right. For you.

I hope not! I'd like food and weight to just fade into the background of my life, rather than being a primary focus. I know that for the rest of my life I will have to be somewhat conscious of the fact that I could easily gain a large quantity of weight. However, I hope that will not rule my life. I hope maintenance will be very boring!