Setting Good Targets

People make resolutions every year as soon as their hangover wears off. They will lose more weight, stick to a budget, pay off their credit cards...the list goes on. On reason most of these goals are never accomplished is they are plucked from the air with no thought. As such they are often too ambitious and not very measurable. As anyone who has ever tried to break a bad habit will tell you, going cold turkey is very hard. The key to setting targets that you can actually achieve lies in understanding what the problem really is and what specific things you should attack to get closer to your goal.

Lets look at everyone's favorite problem. You have eaten your way into the next pants size and now you are ready to get back to your high school wrestling weight. Of course you should change your diet and exercise right? But what does that really mean?

First you have to define a gap between the current reality and where you would like to be. Let's say you are 200 pounds, and you would like to get back to your college playing weight of 180. Good you have a gap, twenty pounds. That is the easy part.

Next you have to break down that gap to understand what makes up that extra. The best way to understand this is to as yourself the questions who, what when, where and how much.

All of these questions require a little investigation and understanding the facts. For example, if you begin tracking your weight twice a day every day, you may find that on Sunday night you always hit your highest weight of the week.

This answers the when question, and tells you that you need to look closer to what you are eating during the weekend. By looking at the nutritional information from what you consume during one weekend, you might find the desert on Saturday night followed by the breakfast buffet on Sunday morning account for 70% of the calories that you consume during the weekend. In fact you might find that Cheese cake with chocolate sauce pancakes, bacon, hash browns, cinnamon rolls, and a muffin add up to roughly 4000 calories. This is great! Did I lose you? You have answered the what question. You have to avoid these two things.

OK there are 3500 calories in one pound of body fat. This means if you keep everything else constant and cut out the dessert and the breakfast buffet and replace it with something that only contains 500 calories, you should be able to lose one pound per week. I am greatly simplifying things for the sake of example, but the logic holds true. This also allows you to set a time line for yourself.

Thus your target becomes By cutting out Cheesecake and Shoney's and continuing everything else I am doing I will lose 20 pounds in the next 20 weeks.
Now you have a specific activity that you can easily track to meet your overall goal.

By defining your overall goals then breaking them down into specific sub-catagories you can get to the specific problems that are plaguing you and decide where to begin the fight.