How To Finally Reach Your Goal Weight In 5 Easy Steps
Let’s begin with a short story that I think many of us can relate to. The story of Jane begins with a New Year’s resolution made at the age of 20.
The Story of Jane
When Jane was 20, she was a junior in college and had not yet been able to shake the freshman 15. Frustrated but determined, on the first of January, Jane joined Weight Watchers and began a rigorous exercise schedule. However, within a couple of months, her college meal plan and busy class schedule eventually got the better of her goals. Jane’s gym membership started to accumulate dust.
At 25, Jane fell in love and gained the happy relationship 15 on top of what she had never managed to lose in college. Sure things were different this time, Jane researched and planned a new diet and exercise plan. On January first, Jane began the Keto diet and joined her local CrossFit gym. However, a few months in and ten pounds down, Jane injured herself during a workout and was forced to take time off, never to return again.
At 30, Jane’s boyfriend proposed and wedding planning ensued. Jane knew she wanted to get in shape to have photos she would be proud to look back on and so she began a rigorous diet program, cutting calories and heading back to the gym with a personal trainer. She got close to her goal weight and was happy with her wedding photos. However, after returning from the honeymoon and without that deadline looming, Jane lost motivation and the weight began to slowly creep back up.
At 35, Jane had given birth to two healthy children and gained back those 30 pounds and then some. She was sick of this ongoing seesaw of weight loss and weight gain and wanted to make a permanent change. That’s when she decided to change her approach.
Today, Jane enjoys a lifestyle that allows her to keep up with her young kids and feel proud of the woman she sees in family photos. Jane ditched the fad diets and rigorous and unrealistic workout regimens. She eats a balanced diet including all of the treats she loves and she has an exercise routine that feels good and adds to her life rather than feeling like a chore. So, what changed?
Simple lifestyle changes can get you off of the rollercoaster of dieting. Follow along to learn how to achieve your goal weight and more importantly, how to make it stick.
5 Steps You Can Take Toward Achieving Your Goals:
1. ChANGE YOUR PERSPECTIVE BY IdentifyING your “Why”
Finding your why goes beyond setting a goal. It’s about finding what motivates you intrinsically and spiritually. Your why needs to be much more than what number you want to see when you step on the scale. Motivation is often fickle, and many people can’t rely on motivation alone to get them to the gym.
Before you set any goals, try to take a minute to get deep with yourself. Why do you want to get healthy? For many parents and grandparents, keeping up with the little ones and seeing them grow over the years is what motivates us to take care of ourselves.
For others, motivation might come from the desire to travel to faraway places or to run a marathon. It can even be that you simply want to treat yourself with love and kindness. Once you figure out your why, write it down and keep it somewhere safe, like in the notes app on your phone or on a sticky note taped to your bathroom mirror.
When you are lacking motivation, reflect on this why to remind yourself why you should do the hard things. Use this exercise to help you to develop self discipline, which is a much more reliable form of energy than motivation.
Part of why this works is that finding your why helps you to change your perspective on health and weight loss. Numbers-focused goals are good long-term things to strive for, but they aren’t motivating when you hit a plateau or late nights at the office leave you too exhausted to make healthy choices.
What this perspective shift does is change health from a goal to strive for to a holistic lifestyle that supports not only what you see on the scale but how you experience aging and your quality of life.
2. Take one Baby Step at a time
Where most people fail along their weight loss journey is by going full steam ahead and quickly burning out, becoming injured, or making huge changes that they can’t maintain over time. This can contribute to that dreaded cycle of starts and stops that never quite takes you to where you want to be.
Instead of focusing on your big goals like what number you want to see on the scale or what size jeans you hope to fit into, break your goal into bite sized chunks that you can actually achieve in a reasonable amount of time.
What this can look like will vary for everyone. For example, say you want to build an exercise habit but haven’t been to the gym in months or even years (I’m not judging!) Instead of diving into a rigorous workout schedule, commit to going three times per week for 30 minutes. Even easier, commit to three 30 minute at-home workouts per week. Follow this schedule for at least a month or until it becomes second nature to you, and only then increase the time you spend or the frequency of workouts.
Creating a goal that you can maintain will help you to build the habit into your lifestyle. After all, it’s easier to build on an existing habit than to create a whole new one out of thin air.
The same goes for your diet. If you are used to getting takeout five nights per week, you probably won’t start cooking every meal at home or doing extensive weekly food prep right out of the gate. Instead, try to add one extra night cooking from home each week and repeat that habit for a month. When the months is up, add another night, and so on until you kick your takeout habit all together.
While going for your goals full steam ahead can feel initially more satisfying than taking these small steps, the opposite can be true in the long term. In fact, when you achieve these smaller goals, you are actually giving yourself a little boost of happy hormones like dopamine each time you check one off. This makes you more likely to maintain good habits and then eventually build off of them.
3. Make exercise fun
Believe it or not, there are people out there who enjoy running. Maybe you’re one of them. I, on the other hand, despise running. I’m slow, I have sports induced asthma, and I always end up with shin splints. When I was younger, I would force myself to go for runs because I believed that cardio was the only way to stay slim and lose weight.
Forcing myself to do a form of exercise I hated always landed me with injuries or burnout, and my routine never lasted long. Finally, I discovered yoga and weightlifting. Yoga made me feel serene and helped my joints, and weightlifting made me feel strong and accomplished.
The real secret here is that I found a form of exercise that I actually thoroughly enjoy. Enjoying your exercise is the best way to create a consistent routine.
When you’re first starting out, try everything. Love dancing? Try Zumba. Is Rocky your favorite movie? Try kickboxing. Were you a jock in high school? Join an indoor soccer league.
All exercise will make you healthier than a sedentary lifestyle, so remove what you think you know about working out. There is no set combination of cardio and strength training that will give you a six pack, and this is just not a reasonable goal for the average person. Instead, the focus of exercise should simply be your health and wellness.
So, take the time to find a form of exercise that not only makes you feel good physically, but that also makes you happy and excited to exercise. It’s like what they say about choosing a career: find something you love and you’ll never work out a day in your life.
4. Eat your greens
Crash diets are a sure way to end up on the weight loss roller coaster. Not only are strict diets hard to maintain, but they can actually negatively impact your digestion and metabolism and leave you worse off than where you started.
When it comes to losing weight, the only proven way to drop pounds is to consume less calories than you burn in a day. Luckily, I have an article all about calorie deficits and how to figure out where your calories should be to stay healthy and lose weight. I recommend starting out with a calorie counting app like Noom or My Fitness Pal while you’re learning what portions look like.
Instead of focusing on what you can cut from your diet, shift your focus to what you can add. A healthy, balanced diet is actually very simple. What your body requires to function smoothly is a balanced mixed of lean protein, complex carbohydrates in the form of whole grains, and fresh fruits and vegetables.
One of my favorite writers, Michael Pollen, puts it plainly: “Eat real food, not too much, and mostly plants.” You can adopt this idea into your lifestyle by adding plant foods to every meal you eat. Whether you’re ordering out or cooking at home, add a side of veggies or a side salad. Eat the veggies first, filling up on the good stuff before moving on to the richer or less healthy parts of your meal. A good rule of thumb is to aim for 50% of your plate to be covered by fresh fruits or vegetables.
Focusing on what you can add to your diet can be easier than summoning the willpower to omit foods you really love, and realistically, you should be able to enjoy less healthy options in moderation. Starting out with your veggies can help you to feel fuller longer and ensure your body is getting all the right nutrients before you indulge.
5. Seek and utilize your support system
What does finding motivation, maintaining healthy habits, and reaching your goals have in common? They are all easier to do with support! Studies show that individuals with healthy support systems are 33% more likely to reach their goals.
One way you can create this support system is by finding a friend who has similar goals to you. Check in with one another weekly, schedule a time that you can hit the gym together, and hold each other accountable when you need a little help making good choices.
If there is no one in your life that you trust to be your support, you can always find a community online by joining a health app like Noom, finding a Facebook group in your area, or even just asking someone you admire at the gym.
You can also join a program like TeleHealthNP for science-backed medical weight loss and support from a nurse practitioner who has studied and trained to help you reach your goals.
Many people feel afraid or embarrassed to seek help, but this could very well be the missing link to actually seeing progress and reaching your goals. After all, it’s always harder to go it alone than to do it with the support of a friend.
Don’t wait, start today.
It all starts with a goal, but more realistically, it starts with a single step toward that goal. The New Year is an amazing and motivating time to start working toward your ultimate goal, but really there is no time like the present. Even if you missed January 1st, your goals are just as real on January 13th or February 8th, or June 22nd.
More importantly, if you start today, you will have done the hardest part. Once you take that first step, you begin to create a momentum that will continue to build and build until you reach your goals. Make 2024 (or whenever you are reading this) the year that you get off the roller coaster and start making real and permanent changes.
If you’re ready, schedule a free consultation with me and learn how you can reach your goal weight in 2024 and maintain it for life.
