Motivational Monday: Set Small Goals

Motivational Monday: Set Small Goals

In this week’s Motivational Monday, I want to talk about the importance of setting small goals in your health journey.  If you look at everything you need to fix, it can be very daunting and a little discouraging because it all seems so overwhelming.

When I first started this way back in 2014, I was 400 lbs, I had Metabolic Syndrome, my cholesterol was crazy and my Blood Pressure was an absolutely insane 200/160 on a good day.  That is a LOT to fix and if I looked at it all at once, I felt so overwhelmed that trying to fix any of it, much less all of it, seemed like a gargantuan task that could only lead to failure.

Once I did my research and figured out how I was going to attack the problem, I decided to not worry about all the medical stuff that was wrong with me like the BP, but to just look at my weight as a barometer of my progress.  In fact, I went and bought a special scale because the one I had couldn’t go as high as I needed it to go. (Now I have a fancy one that connects to my phone through BlueTooth to record all my info.  I think it’s awesome!)

Then I decided exactly how I was going to do it and what I decided on was to only shoot for a 10 lb loss.  That’s it.  Not the whole 250 lbs I needed to lose, not get my BP under control or fix the metabolic syndrome, just lose 10 lbs.  It took a few weeks but I eventually got to 390, then I made 380 my next goal.  My entire weight loss journey has been 10 lbs at a time.

Yes I’ve lost 190 lbs so far but really, I just met my 10 lb weight loss goal 19 times.  Just small baby steps, one after another to get me where I wanted to be.  No crazy surgeries or pills or starvation diets.  Just taking care of my body, eating the right foods and paying attention to how my body reacted.  I repeated what worked and stopped doing what didn’t.

In your weight loss journey, figure out the small steps you can take to incrementally get you where you want to go.  Maybe you try to lower your BP 5 points at a time or increase your max bench press 5 lbs at a time or maybe you are just trying to lose weight like me.  Whatever it is, don’t focus on the mountain, just look at the next step in your journey.  Set a small goal, work towards it, celebrate when you reach it, then set a new goal and repeat.

Don’t allow yourself to become overwhelmed, just move forward and complete your journey.

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