Good goals are those that take a little time and effort, sometimes a lot, to do. If our Goals are too easy, why bother, right? You can put them on your to-do list and not go through all the fuss of the goal setting process. Big goals, or at least goals that take time, effort, and planning, are how we grow and develop our selves and abilities. However, there is a potential downside to that. Let’s look at the weight loss goals. It seems that most people can bear to wear a few pounds. Some of us are working towards it and some of us are not.
When we work on our weight loss goals, we tend to measure everything. You can’t track and manage something if you don’t measure it after all. We get excited when the scale shows a leak. It makes us want to weigh ourselves every day to see how far we’ve come. That can be dangerous for someone who works with their weight. Our scales will not show a loss every day, and when they do, the loss could be very small that day. Weight fluctuates as part of our normal weekly routine. It depends a lot on what we have done to burn calories, what we eat, when we eat and how much we eat. In addition, there are other factors such as our natural metabolism, the nutrients in our food, the amount of water we drink, etc.
It’s not uncommon to work hard on our Goals and then see no progress or little progress right away. Some Goals require enormous and sustained effort to get things going. Weight loss can be the same way. We can also reach stages where the same effort no longer produces the same results. That could be a natural result of the plan you are following for a particular goal. In weight loss, it can be disconcerting as our bodies adapt to new levels of activity and eating. There are many resources to combat that and prevent you from entertaining yourself, so I will not dwell on them.
Our problem when this happens is that we focus on incremental results that we think we should see on a daily basis. That is not always possible. When we don’t see them, we can start to notice that one thing. We started trying to force things to get that little victory and the adrenaline that goes with it. When this happens, we go out of our plan. We tried shortcuts and tricks. For a weight loss goal, this can be disastrous. You can derail all your efforts by damaging your body through crash diets, super fasting, starvation diets, etc. It can also derail you emotionally. It’s depressing to see progress suddenly stop or even regress when you’re still doing the same things as before.
Don’t let that get you down. It is natural and it will pass. We cannot measure the success of a goal in small, incremental steps. They measure progress on a small scale. The larger scale is more important right now. A better question right now is what is the trend of weight loss? Are we trending down overall, starting to rise or just neutral? Anything that starts to stick in the long run, like weight gain or leveling, only then becomes a problem to be solved. That’s true for all Goals, not just weight loss. Daily measurement is good, as long as it doesn’t make you lose sight of long-term progress toward your Goal.