By Herb Duncan
Every venture begins with a goal and your health is no different. It’s much better if you set a realistic goal. Many people set fitness goals but many set unrealistic ones. You might say to yourself, “I’m going to lose 30 pounds in two weeks and lose 3 belt sizes!” That’s a pretty ambitious goal. As a matter of fact if you watch enough television all those infomercial companies are hoping you make this type of goal. But unless you know what is physiologically possible, you’ll be setting yourself up for failure every time. Don’t set a goal that is next to impossible to achieve, or achieved in an unhealthy way. This will eventually bring you right back to square one, only twice as bad. The fact is, if you lose more than two or three pounds per week, you will end up burning precious muscle tissue which is needed to burn off body fat. You will end up slowing your metabolism to a snail’s pace, which will make it very hard and you will most likely binge.
So what is a realistic goal amount? You can safely lose about two to three pounds of fat per week without hitting starvation mode or losing muscle or yanking all of you hair out in the process. So let’s add that up. You can reasonably expect 15 to 35 pounds of fat to drop off in 12 weeks. How much depends on you: how well you eat, exercise and give the body what it needs. Basically stick to that very obtainable planned goal. Don’t be surprised that over the time period that marvelous body of yours gains 10 pounds of lean tissue while dropping 20 pounds of body fat.
Lean muscle is a great thing! It gives your body those shapes and curves in all the right places and lean muscle is a body fat scavenger to boot. This is why most people fail. They are more concerned with just losing weight rather then the type of weight they are losing. And all the fad weight loss companies are banking on this. By the time next year rolls around they will have introduced a new fad that works twice as fast and you will have put back on your weight with a little extra and more jiggle. Most people that have tried a new fad diet in their lifetime have, on average, tried four or five fad diets all with the eventual same results - failure!
As I stated earlier, set a realistic goal write it down and put a realistic timeline on it. Goal setting gives you a clearly defined objective to build a good routine around. Writing you goal down makes it real. Stay away from fads. Find out how your body truly works from an educated professional and get on a realistic program you can do for the rest of your life and enjoy. My mother is 68 years of age and she runs circles around me - really. Its not genetics or luck she set a realistic goal some 30 years ago and hasn’t looked back
Give the body what it needs and it will work miracles for you, just give it a chance.
Until next time happy training.
