• Set a goal weight.
  

  First, you need a goal weight. Personally, I know I was pretty fit in high school when I weighed 185, so I chose that as my goal weight. If nothing else, you can use the BMI calculator from Step 1 to determine a rough estimate of your “healthy weight”, keeping in mind this is not an accurate measurement. Subtract your goal weight from your current weight, then divide by two – that’s roughly how many weeks it should take to reach your goal, assuming an average weight loss of 2lb/week . For example, last September I weighed 265 with a goal weight of 185:

  265 - 185 = 80 / 2 = 40 weeks to reach goal weight

  Using timeanddate.com, I can easily add 40 weeks to September 1, 2006 to determine my goal date of June 8, 2007. At 196, I am around six weeks from reaching my goal (assuming a consistent 2lb/week loss, which to be honest is probably a stretch), so I am on track to meet my goal.

  Also, give yourself some flexibility with your goal weight. If you consistently exercise at least 30 minutes a day and maintain a healthy daily caloric intake, but can’t seem to shake those last 5 or 10lbs, perhaps it’s time to re-evaluate your goal weight. The goal weight you begin with is somewhat arbitrary; allow yourself to re-adjust based on what your body tells you it needs.

• Set daily goals.
  Simply establishing a goal weight and date wasn’t enough to keep me motivated – the goal weight was so large a change it was overwhelming, and the date was so far away there was no immediacy. I needed motivation to start changing today, so I set some daily goals. They started out simple – drink at least 64oz of water, do at least 30 minutes of exercise, maintain a proactive meal schedule (I’ll address that later) and maintain a maximum caloric intake. As I practiced my goals every day, they slowly turned into healthy lifestyle habits; as my daily goals became habits, I started making new goals – planning meals ahead of time in order to meet my daily serving of fruits and vegetables and at least 25 pushups and 50 situps a night. Other daily goals might include so many steps on a pedometer, a particular distance to walk or run – anything that serves to motivate you on a daily basis and grounded in a healthy lifestyle habit. Setting daily goals that are measurable and easily accomplished helps incorporate fitness into your daily routine (which leads to habit and lifestyle changes) and keeps your attitude positive through success.

  I strongly discourage setting daily, weekly or even monthly weight goals. The numbers on the scale don’t really seem to be directly connected to your daily habits – you might lose 4lbs one week and gain 1lb the next. Because weight loss can be due to water retention, muscle growth and other non-diet factors, it’s not within your direct control – use your weight as a metric of trending progress, not an indication of daily, weekly or even monthly success. If you implement healthy goals and practice them daily, the weight will eventually come off, and your focus will be where it should be: awareness of and control over your daily choices in life.

  One method of evaluating your daily goals is the S.M.A.R.T. mnemonic – goals should be Specific, Measurable, Actionable, Realistic and Timed. Here’s some examples of how I set goals using this method:

  • Specific.
    Each goal should describe exactly and clearly what it is you want to achieve. Additionally, each goal should describe only one achievement. Goals with vague descriptions or multiple achievements are overwhelming, making it hard to stay focused and motivated.
  • Measurable.
    Successfully achieving goals daily is important to maintaining a positive attitude and practicing healthy habits that lead to lifestyle change. Design your goals to have a defined, measureable outcome. You can’t measure “walk more”, but you can measure “walk at least 30 minutes per day.”
  • Actionable.
    Daily goals should start as habits that you identify as components of a healthy, fit lifestyle – drinking water, exercising, parking further away from buildings, etc. Focusing your goals on actions you can perform (“eat 1 serving of fruit per day”) as opposed to outcomes (“lose 2lbs per week”) puts you in control of successfully achieving your goals – success is measured not by outcomes over which you have no direct control, but rather by actions you choose to take.
  • Realistic.
    Goals need to be achievable, but not effortless. If you consistently fail to achieve your daily goals, you defeat the purpose of having a daily goal. Likewise, make your daily goals too easy, and you remove any sense of accomplishment or success. Strike a balance between unrealistic and effortless by determining your limitations and push to meet them, then exceed them. Can you walk 15 minutes? Set a goal for the first week to walk 15 minutes, then expand by 5 minutes per week. When determining your limitations, be honest and strive to beat your own limitations, not meet someone else’s.
  • Timed.
    Without a defined starting point and target deadline, a goal is meaningless – set a deadline too close, and you set yourself up for failure (“drink 96oz of water by 10:00am”); set a deadline too distant, and you lose motivation (like the distant deadline for our goal weight). Designing your goals to be realistically achievable within one day helps maintain focus, motivation and daily practice of healthy habits. If you find you are unable to maintain focus on a daily goal, break it into smaller parts of the day – drink 32oz of water by 11am, 32oz by 3pm, and 32oz by 11pm.

  So, how does S.M.A.R.T. help define daily goals? Here’s an example of a non-specific goal:

  Drink more water, exercise more and eat better.

  How do you track your successful completion of this goal? How much is “more water”, how long is “exercise more” and what diet choices comprise “eat better?” It is impossible to tick this goal as successfully completed, and therefore provides no positive feedback or continual motivation.

  Editing this goal to apply the principles of S.M.A.R.T., we get:

  1. Drink at least 64oz of water a day.
  2. Walk at least 30 minutes a day.
  3. Substitute one serving of fruit for one sweet treat per day.
  4. Maintain a daily caloric intake of no more than 1800 calories.

  Each of these goals is now something I can successfully complete at the end of each day: I can measure specific descriptors like 64oz and 30 minutes; I can perform actions like drinking water and walking; eating one serving of fruit in lieu of a sweet dessert is realistic but not easy (at least, not to begin with); and each goal is scheduled for completion by the end of the day. Each day, I practice awareness and obtain positive feedback by reviewing my list of daily goals for completion, and exploring new tactics for tackling those I didn’t complete. This is a successful list of goals.

  Just a head’s up – once you meet your goal weight, the hard work starts. Working towards your goal weight provides motivation, which turns into exhileration and success upon meeting your goal. Afterwards, maintaining your weight without that powerful motivator can be difficult. Practicing daily goals helps alleviate the loss of motivation; setting an “alarm weight” of 10lbs over your goal weight helps trigger recommitment. We’ll talk about alarm weights later; just know that daily goals not only help you achieve your goal weight, they help you maintain it.

• Set dream goals.
  Ask yourself – what would you love to do that that being overweight prevents? What do you dream of accomplishing after re-shaping your habits into a fit lifestyle? Personally, I would love to run a marathon at Disney World – I am a Disney fanatic, and I used to enjoy running cross-country. This is a different type of goal, which provides a different type of motivation – where a goal weight outlines the scope of your weight loss and daily goals identify healthy lifestyle habits to practice, a dream goal comes from your heart and hooks your emotions. Commit yourself to accomplishing at least 2 “I would love to be able to…” dreams, write them down so they are tangible and concrete, then use them to combat cravings. What is more important – the temporary rush and satisfaction of a Big Mac or running a marathon at Disney? Each time you choose your dream, you get closer to living it.

• Use constant reminders of your goals.
  Constant reminders help keep your goals in the forefront of your mind and steel your nerves in times of need. My wife put my high-school picture on the fridge as a constant reminder of how I looked when I was fit. Since often overeating is tied to emotional eating, your constant reminder should be something that hooks you emotionally. Ask yourself – what are you losing weight for? Is it for your child? Put a picture of your child next to your credit cards, so when you buy food you see it. Is it something you used to fit into, like a bikini? Hang it on the wall where you see it every morning. For me, it was the photo on the fridge, an image in my head of playing hide-and-seek with my future child, and riding rides at Disney without being uncomfortable and embarassed.

  One last word on goals and constant reminders – the Success Begins Today site has some great wallet-sized templates (two of which are pictured below), including the Goal Setting Toolkit and 5-Minute Dieteer, that you can rubber-band to your credit card, fold up with your money, tape to your computer screen and put in other random places to serve as one more constant goal reminder. If you pick up that bag of Doritos in a moment of emotional stress, the act of removing your goal-reminder from your credit card could be the thing that brings you to awareness. Every little bit helps.

So now we have a starting point and well-defined goals. Next, we take the first step to achieving those goals – controlling consumption by counting every calorie.

Images from Success Begins Today site

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Step 1 – Calculate and record your starting points – BMI, daily caloric intake and measurements.

The first step to losing weight is to identify your starting point. It’s not enough to simply stand on a scale and record your starting weight – you should also calculate your BMI, daily caloric intake and record a couple of body measurements.

• Calculate your BMI.
  BMI (Body mass index) is a fairly hotly debated metric, but still commonly used to roughly determine how overweight a person is based on height and weight. BMI is not meant to be an accurate measurement of fat or muscle, but rather a calculation of a person’s overall body mass used for statistical comparison against a BMI chart based on World Health Organization data. Although BMI isn’t meant to be an accurate measurement, it’s still important to know, as it gives a rough indication of how overweight you are. While the math is fairly easy to calculate, there are calculators like the one hosted at American Cancer Society’s site that quickly calculate your BMI and list a legend for comparison. For example, here’s my BMI:

  

  It bears repeating – calculating your BMI is simply a matter of comparing your statistics to those of millions of other people. Falling in the obese category does not necessarily mean you are obese, it simply means that comparing your height and weight to millions of other people who have been observed, you have a statistical probability of being obese. Before labelling yourself as obese and attempting aggressive weight loss methods, see a doctor – he or she can properly assess your body fat percentage and other factors to help determine your best weight loss strategy.

• Calculate daily caloric intake.
  Losing weight is all about the balance between calorie consumption and calorie expenditure. At the most basic level, weight loss is simply enforcing a daily calorie deficit – calculate how many calories per day your body needs to maintain its current weight, then shave off roughly 1000 through combined diet change and exercise. A 1000 calorie-per-day reduction should result in roughly 2lbs/week weight loss, which is what I’ve heard from doctors and nutritionists as a safe rate – any more can lead to health complications and putting your body in starvation mode. I’ve also heard less than 1400/day is flirting with unhealthiness. As always, seek advice from a medical professional for questions or concerns you may have, or complications you experience.

  Luckily, calculating your daily caloric intake is also simple – the American Cancer Society also hosts a calorie calculator. For example, here’s my calculation, showing I should limit my caloric balance to roughly 1850/day:

  

  Of course, how you choose to spend your calories is just as important as knowing your daily balance. We’ll talk about that later in the series.

• Record body measurements.
  Maintaining a positive attitude is an important key aspect of successfully making lifestyle changes. For me, it was like a friend had died and I was in mourning – I no longer had food to turn to for consolation and emotional support. Watching the numbers roll down on the scale didn’t help maintain a positive attitude, so I turned elsewhere – my own body.

  I kept track of my measurements in certain areas, like my waist, hips, elbows, upper arms and thighs. As my waist size changed, I rewarded myself with new clothes (although, as I talked about previously, I did so in a frugal manner) instead of rewarding myself with a food-related treat. Also, I took a picture at the beginning of your weight loss and store it away – I didn’t personally use my picture for motivation during weight-loss, but it serves as a powerful reminder for what happens if I slip back into old habits.

  Some other measurements might prove motivational as well. For instance, one of the final reasons I got serious about weight loss was my cholesterol – it was high enough my doctor decided I needed to take medication. Tracking some medical data, like cholesterol and resting glucose levels, proved to be just as motivational and positively reinforcing as the weight-loss itself.

So we’ve got a good starting point – a beginning weight, starting BMI, some body measurements and perhaps some medical data. Next, we need to set some goals.

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