Setting Smart Goals for Weight Loss

Setting goals for weight loss, or any other thing in life, is one of the things that greatly affects your success in weight loss. When you don’t have a written goal it’s very difficult to track your own progress. Clear goals means clear results and clear sense of direction. Why is setting goals for weight loss that important?

Goal Weight Loss

When you don’t have a written goal that you want to accomplish you can be doing things that you don’t want to do. A lot of people are going to the gym and are not even sure if they are doing the right things. They don’t know if they’re efficient. They see some results but not as much as they think they should. They are simply going through the motions, and they pray to get better results. Maybe this isn’t you, but you need to be aware how goals affect your progress.Goals give you sense of control

Having a goal that you want to achieve gives you direction. You have a target. By having a target you can see when you’re getting off track. If you don’t have a sense of direction, or a target, you don’t know if you’re on or off track. You’re like a ship without a rudder going in circles. You will crash sooner or later.

Having a goal gives you sense of control and power once you start going toward it. It gives you sense of pleasure when you check off the little things from the list that needs to be done to get you to that goal. So that’s the reason why people without goals very often get off track and lose their motivation. It’s because they don’t know exactly where they want to be. It’s important to know that your mind is like a missile. It’s always setting goals whether you’re aware of it or not. There are a lot of studies proving this point. You want to make this function conscious so that it boosts your efforts and motivation with it.

It’s not the same if you want to gain weight or lose weight. Those are two different goals that have different types of training and dieting. And yes somebody actually wants to gain weight.

If you want to lose weight you may want to cut down the calories, carbohydrates, unnecessary sugars, and bad fats but if you want to gain weight, you need to increase calorie intake and increase carb intake. (I’ll not talk about the exact amount or type of nutrients needed for that in this article.)

You need to know where you’re going. Because if you don’t, you can get easily distracted by all the “trendy” and “new ways” of losing or gaining weight or burning fat or anything that currently sells in the market. The things like, lose 30 pounds of fat in one week. Goals are important!

Biggest mistake about goals is to think that goals aren’t important, or that you already know all about setting goals. If you think something like:“What is to know about setting goals… it’s simple… you just write them down…” it’s probably because you don’t know key points and why they are important. It is clear that you don’t know how they affect your motivation and thinking.

It is crucial that you know exactly where you’re going because, as I said before, you can easily wonder off track. You will eventually lose motivation without goals because, when things get though, you’ll have no goal and no reason to accomplish it! No sense of direction or drive… Why you ask?

It’s not the same thing to lose 5, 20 or maybe even 100 pounds, or to get in shape… You can be skinny and out of shape. The two are poles apart. While you only need to eat fewer calories to lose weight, you need to train in a certain way to be in shape.

Same goes for gaining weight and gaining muscle. It’s not the same to gain 20 pounds, or build 20 pounds of lean muscle. Goals give you sense of what activities are needed to achieve it and what activities are just wasting your time.Set the right goals

What do I mean by “right goals? It’s important that you set goals that feel realistic to you. If you set your goal too high you will feel too anxious about it. If you set your goal too low you’ll not be exited or motivated to achieve it. You need to set a goal that is in alignment with your beliefs.

Okay now I’m getting into “beliefs stuff”.. but yeah you need to do it that way. If you don’t believe that you can lose or gain 20 pounds, why would you even start if you “know” (or believe) you can’t? It’s actually that simple. Set the goal that YOU believe is possible for YOU! Not for your friend, not for your neighbour and certainly not for that people from the covers of magazines. Set goals that are believable to you! Set goals that make sense for YOU not for someone else.

I’m not suggesting that you set your goal too low, but to set the one that excites you, the one that is a little of your comfort zone. Something that you never did so far and you want to do badly. That’s the goal you want, that will push you to do your disciplines.