Your Weight Loss Goal

What Should It Include?

Your weight loss goal can make a huge difference in your results. With poor goals you get poor results. What should your goal include?

Include These

Your weight loss goal should include the following:

1. Weight Goal
2. Body Fat Percentage Goal or Fat Loss Goal
3. Body Goals
4. Physical goals

As you can tell from most of my site, I am death of losing lean muscle for weight loss. It is horrible for your weight.

One of the main reasons you gain weight back in the first place is because weight is the only goal. This almost always results in reduced lean muscle mass. Again, as I said in body fat percentage, there is reason to lose muscle mass when very overweight. But after that, you need to strengthen and revitalize your muscle tissue.

And for that reason, I encourage you to include other factors into your weight loss goal. In fact, I would rather look at your weight loss and incorporate it into your entire physical ideal scene. What is your ideal scene for your physical health?

Fat Loss Goal

For healthy and natural weight loss, I encourage you to set a fat loss goal. You can do this by getting your body fat percentage and multiplying it by your total body weight and you will get the weight of your body fat. Or you can set a body fat percentage goal. I am more in favor of using a body fat percentage goal. It is easier for you to do and it promotes health.

When you start a program with me, I establish all these goals. I take a look at your body fat percentage and set a goal for this rather than a fat loss goal. If it is at 29% I talk with you and find out what you want out of your weight loss. Then we we will set it at maybe 25% or 15% or 20%. It all depends on what you want and what you are willing to do.

10 % and below, for example is at an elite level. Elite athletes reach these levels. So I don't encourage using these very low goals without understanding what is involved. Bodybuilders need extremely low body fat levels as well. But they do a major calorie reduction in their diet to get rid of fat before the competition.

The same is true with fitness athletes. During these times they have to walk a very fine line everyday and it is difficult. Every portion of food has to be watched. These athletes experience reduced energy levels. For this reason the spring involved in reducing fat levels to extremely low levels is a short sprint up to the competition and then they revert back to higher body fat levels.

So we set goals you can achieve and we attain it in a way that increases your health and also gives you new abilities.

That leads me to my next weight loss goal criteria ...

Body Goals

What do you want your body to HAVE? This includes various qualitative and qualitative goals. What are things you want to experience that you are not able to experience right now. Are there clothes you want to fit in. Do you want to feel rested when waking up? Do you want to feel younger? Less tired? Do you want to be able to keep up with your kids?

Physical Goals

What do you want your body to be able to DO? When you find yourself one day overweight, you can be sure that you went out of shape long before. Your physical abilities stopped being used a long time ago. For some, they were never used. With the current trend in child obesity, this is becoming more and more the case where there is very little physical activity performed.

My tips for setting goals here is to look for activities that you like to do. If it is dancing, walking, running, look at what you can do now and try to quantify it. Then set a goal on that quantity.

For me, I found that my functional strength decreased remarkably when I gained weight. I had to do some construction work and move and lift a lot of heavy equipment and be in different body positions to do my work. I got winded very easily. As I started increasing my physical strength as I outline in "Best Exercise to Lose Weight".

So take a look at what you want to accomplish and factor these into your overall weight loss goal.