Step 6. Make goals.

Make realistic goals. Are you doing what you need to do to achieve that goal? Weight loss is definitely a marathon, not a sprint.
Measure your success. Take your measurements. It's amazing to look back and say, "really, I had that many inches on my thighs? Wow."

I had both quantitative and qualitative goals.
I wanted to "feel better about myself." "Fit in clothes better." "Wear a bathing suit." "Have less flabby arms." "Have toned thighs." "Have a firmer core." I want to look like an athlete. Is that a realistic goal? Yes- because I know that it is going to take work, and I know what I have to do to get there.

My original goal was to lose 30 lbs. I wanted to lose 5 lbs per month. I made myself a spreadsheet of my goals. As I got to 20 lbs lost and realized, "Did I really just do that?" I made a more aggressive goal, I decided to lose 40 lbs.

As I hit 25 lbs lost, a bunch of people started telling me that I was losing "too much weight" and that I "needed to stop losing weight or I'd disappear." Now, I had noticed that my face was thinner. I did think, "I hope I stop losing weight in my face, I'm happy with my face the way it is now." Then I noticed that my hip bones were sticking out a lot. (I then noticed that that was only during certain exercises, and not all the time.) I asked my husband what he thought about how much weight I'd lost: was it enough? He said to lose 10 more and if that was too much to gain 5 back. I hadn't taken my measurements in months.

When I got my fancy scale, I set goals for where I wanted my Body Fat, Water Weight, Muscle Mass, BMR, Visceral Fat, Metabolic Age, Bone Weight, and Physique Rating to be. I made a spread sheet of what each goal was, and where I expected to be each month toward those goals. For the first 6 weeks I did really well in getting the numbers better. Not so much for the last 4 weeks. Grrr.

When I took my measurements, I had some great changes. I'd noticed that my pants were literally falling off of me and that I needed to throw them in the basement for a good reason. I pulled my old clothes out of the basement. A lot of those are now in the "too big to wear" category. Yay. Looking back, I've lost a LOT of inches. However, the act of taking my measurements also helped me really see myself. Yeah, the weight on the scale's looking good, and other people are saying to stop. But is my body really where I want it? No, it's not. I looked at the places where the extra fat is still hanging. That re-motivated me to keep losing weight, because I'm not where I want my body to be.

I truly believe that people should have goals. How can you assess what you've done, if you have not set any guidelines to measure against? I feel that without goals, people just flounder about. People need direction. Lack of direction gets us in trouble. What do you want out of this life? Or are you just here for the ride?