How to Choose the Perfect Weight Loss Goal for You

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Related Episodes:

• Mindful Eating for Weight Loss
• Losing Weight and Saving Time
• Losing Weight and Increasing Connection
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Full Episode Transcript:

How to Choose the Perfect Weight Loss Goal for You

 

Hi there, welcome to the Eating Habits for Life podcast. I am so glad to have you here with me today.

If you’re new here, this is the podcast where you will get help for your eating habits so that you can have increased energy, be able to enjoy food more, rather than feel negatively towards it. You’ll get help with weight loss, but in a very healthy and natural way, so that it’ll stay off. And in a very nonrestrictive way.

My philosophy is that you get to enjoy the food that you’re eating, you learn what your body needs regarding volume because no one wants to feel hungry all day.

My philosophy is also that changing your eating habits and losing weight doesn’t have to be hard. And what really helps with that is your mindset about it, which is something that I help you with as well.

And I do have something to give you for free that is new, which is a weight loss habits class plus workbook.

This class is a video class that I recorded recently. It is up and ready for you to grab. You can do so right on my website, https://kate-johnston-coaching.myflodesk.com/free-course. Or if you go to the episode description on whichever app you’re listening to, I’ve put a link there. If you’re listening from my website on the episode page, you’ll see it there too.

So, there are certain weight loss habits that really help you to lose weight and keep it off in a very healthy, natural way. I am not about restrictive short-term diets. I am all about the long game. Meaning, becoming physically and emotionally healthier, and being able to enjoy your food, without feeling like it controls you.

To be able to lose weight in a sustainable way, where you’re not left feeling hungry. So, that’s what this weight loss habits free class helps you with. In the class, I make these weight loss habits very doable. Very easy to do. It’s pretty much failproof.

The workbook will help you to apply what you learn. It’s printable, and it’s simple, doesn’t take very long, so definitely watch the video class and do the workbook along with it. Just investing the little bit of time in both of those things, and applying what you learn, which will also take very little time and energy, will potentially add years to your life. So worth it.

Alright, let’s dive into today’s episode. I usually jump right in, so my apologies for the delayed start on this one, but hey, I figured you wouldn’t mind me offering you something for free to help you.

OK, so today I want to talk about how to choose the perfect weight loss goal for you.

You may or may not have heard the terms, result-based goal, and identity-based goal. A result-based goal is a specific number result when it comes to weight loss goals. Many times, people have a specific number in their head. I find, that often this number is what a person weighed years ago, when they felt their best.

This makes sense to have this number as your goal if that is the case. It’s what the human brain recalled feeling the best for them.

Of course, it’s always possible to reach this goal. I’m a strong believer that anything is possible, especially when you establish a mindset that helps you to achieve. This is something I work on with my clients because it’s just so important.

Now, a result-based goal is very measurable because it’s a number. Measurable goals are great. They’re great because you can take action, see what the result is, or see what the number on the scale is and use that as data, and either continue to do what you’re doing, or make some changes to try to get a different result, or a different number on the scale.

It’s very mathematical. It’s very much like doing an experiment. This is all well and good.

But how do you know what number to choose? How do you know that you’ll feel a certain way when you hit the number that pops into your head? You don’t. You can take a guess, but as you change and your body changes, you really don’t know at what weight you’ll feel good at. What weight you’ll feel healthy at.

And especially if you are adding something in like strength training, to changing your eating habits to lose weight and get healthier, the number on the scale won’t necessarily represent the changes that are occurring in your body. Because if you’re adding more muscle, you’re not going to see the number on the scale decrease as much. That’s because muscle weighs more than fat, which I’m sure you’ve heard before.

Also, the same is true if you are removing some things from your diet like sugar and flour and adding in more protein. Your body composition will change.

Therefore, having a number in mind is certainly a good thing, and when I work with my clients, we break that up into much smaller goals so that if it’s a really big number, it doesn’t feel so far away. And we work on making little changes that week to advance you and push you towards where you want to be.

So how to choose the perfect weight loss goal for you, in my professional opinion, is the identity-based goal. Meaning, who do you want to be? How do you want to feel? What are the results that you want for yourself because of losing weight?

For example, do you want to be someone who is able to move around more easily, so she can enjoy more experiences? Do you want to be someone who knows she is feeding her body nutritious foods, rather than non-nutritious foods?

Do you want to be someone who feels confident, not because the number on the scale, but because you’ve shown yourself that you can break a bad eating habit that you felt was controlling you and was causing you a lot of pain? Do you want to be someone who looks in the mirror and sees a radiant person reflecting back?

Do you want to be someone who has established a routine of cooking simple meals to enjoy with her family, rather than getting takeout food most nights? Do you want to be someone who no longer has to worry as much about diabetes or high blood pressure, because you’re managing it with lifestyle?

So, who is it that you want to be? Who do you envision once you have the weight loss results you want? That’s how to choose the perfect weight loss goal for you.

Not necessarily the number that you want to hit, but how you want to feel. How you want to think about yourself. The things you want to be able to do because you’ve lost weight and changed your eating habits along the way.

Because as you’re losing weight in a healthy way, either by listening to this podcast, or working together towards your goals with me one-on-one, you’ll start noticing that you’re hitting lots of those goals. And then you’ll most likely know when you want to start maintaining. Because it’s never just about the number. It’s about how you feel.

So, you don’t need to wait until you get the weight loss results, as far as a specific number goes to start feeling better. You start feeling better quickly. And you especially start feeling better quickly when you really stop to think about what it is you really want for yourself. Who you want to be. How you want to feel.

Basically, what your future version of you is or your future self. Because this is unique to you. This is how to choose the perfect weight loss goal for you.

Not the number, but your identity, who you are, how you feel, how you think about yourself, how you show up in the world, meaning the actions or inactions you take. Specifically, as that relates to eating habits and weight loss and other habits, that means maybe how much you eat or what you eat. That means taking some time to move your body and keeping that promise to yourself to try to get 7 hours of sleep rather than five.

For me, when I was really doing a lot of emotional eating and noticed that I was gaining weight, I did have a number in mind, but the bigger picture that I had in mind was to get back to the weight where I felt like a strong runner. Also, I wanted to be someone who fed my body more nutrients than I was currently feeding it.

Because if you haven’t listened to the podcast episode, which was the last episode on my emotional eating habit, you’ll find out that I was eating probably like 80 to 90% carbohydrates all day. As in pasta, bread, granola bars, pretzels, crackers. Not so much carbohydrates that are found in vegetables and even beans. I was doing refined carbohydrates.

Therefore, I wanted to be someone who felt like I was always nourishing my body and could still enjoy the cookies and the bread and pasta, just not all day, every single day. I also wanted to be someone who felt like it was easy to maintain my body weight. I didn’t want to have to worry about gaining more and more weight as I got older.

At the time, I set those identity-based goals, without knowing what identity-based goals were, and as I was making the changes to my eating habits, I got to enjoy at least a portion of those results almost immediately.

Alright, so here’s an exercise for you to do to on how to choose the perfect weight loss goal for you. You can certainly do a result-based goal, meaning choose a specific number. However, I also recommend that you do an identity-based goal.

Because that is really the perfect weight loss goal for you. It’s much deeper and more fulfilling than just a specific number. Grab a pen and paper right now if you can and not driving and try to fill an entire page if you can on who you want to be.

Meaning how you want to feel after you’ve lost some weight, how you want to be thinking about your capability and about yourself, how you want to talk to yourself in your head of course, how you want to see yourself when you look in the mirror.

Write down the things that you’d love to be able to do once you’ve changed your eating habits and maybe some of the other weight loss habits, and lost weight. Write down the experiences you’d love to have, and even how you’d love to interact with other people as the person who has made healthy changes and established some healthier habits and lost weight.

And once you’ve written all this down, it’ll probably be nice and messy, but you can then rewrite it more neatly if you’d like and put it someplace that you can look at it often. Because this is important. How you feel and how you experience your life now and in the future is the most important thing. It affects not just you, but other people around you. And then because it affects other people around you, it affects other people around them.

You’ll even inspire other family members to make some changes and potentially save their lives. If you have children, you’ll set a really great example for them. We’ve all seen everywhere that Americans are just getting less and less healthy, and that includes children. We can’t let this happen to our kids. It starts with you though.

Listening to this podcast will certainly help you get started with all of this and with changing your eating habits and losing weight. I know it does, because I’ve had people message and e-mail me that it’s helped them change their eating habits and lose weight.

You might get to a certain point though that you feel stuck, or you fear that you are going to lose momentum and gain it all back. I don’t want this to happen. I work hard to make this podcast helpful for you, so let’s talk about keeping you going and getting all the results you want. Because I can help you with that in a one-on-one fashion with private coaching.

To talk more about that, I invite you to access my calendar and book a free consultation with me. You can easily do that with the link in the episode description if you’re listening right on a podcast listening app like apple or Spotify. You’ll also see a link if you’re listening to this episode right on my website via the episode page. So, book a free consultation and let’s talk about how to get you those amazing results.

The free consultation is for a full hour, so you won’t feel rushed. That’s way better than the amount of time that patient appointments were when I was a Physician Assistant full time. We would have about 10 to 15 minutes to cover everything. Never enough time. But this is my business now and I get to offer a full hour for free consultations. No more of this 10-to-15-minute stuff.

Alright, thanks for listening, take care and I’ll talk with you soon.