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> 'I'm going to loose weight this year' Okay, how are you going to do that? About this goal specifically, I found it beneficial to stop thinking about a target weight. Instead think about: What level of fitness do I want? What kind of health do I want? (the two are related, but not the same) Main reason: If you take up exercise and are not obese or at the higher end of "overweight", you may not lose weight for the first couple of months (or ever!) depending on the style of exercise you've selected and your body's tendency to build muscle. If you take up weightlifting, and are overweight but not obese, you could see your body composition basically trade, nearly pound for pound, fat for muscle. You will look better and feel better but not achieve the weight goal, which can be disheartening to people who have an explicit weight goal even though what they've done has measurably improved their fitness and health. And if you take up running or something similarly cardio intensive, you may gain weight (building up leg and core muscles with running, for instance) in the first few weeks before any weight loss begins. This is similarly disheartening and demotivating. Instead, think about what fitness or health level you want and why, then work towards them. My fitness goal was predicated on being able to play back-to-back soccer games (rec league, 70 minute games). So I needed to be able to sustain nearly 2 hours of continuous movement including sprints and extended periods of running/jogging. So I took up running and got my 5k time below 25 minutes, then upped it to 10k runs. A single game left me feeling like I'd just finished a warmup, the second game would leave me feeling like I'd actually exercised but not fatigued. My health goal was predicated on getting off a statin and reducing my blood pressure (largely work stress induced, but my weight and fitness at the time pushed it into the pre-hypertensive range). So I ate better in order to achieve that, and reduced (not eliminated, still drink coffee black) caffeine in order to improve sleep (both improved sleep and reduced caffeine also helped reduce my anxiety levels and my periodic panic attacks at the time left me, happy side effect). Both of those left me at a lower weight than I started at, but I had no explicit weight target. If I had, I could've been demotivated by early weight gains (when I started running I went from 215 to 220lbs) or later weight gains (when I added BJJ to my exercise regimen I went from 175 to 190). Both of those were the result of increased muscle mass, but they both took me in the "wrong" direction if weight loss and a weight target were specific goals. |
I've spent large chunks of my life as an extremely fit ultra-endurance athlete. I've done events that other ultra-endurance athletes called "insane". I wasn't at the front of the pack, but I was at the front of the middle of the pack.
These days, I'm not interested in racing. I'm not even interested in training. But if I do think about "fitness" or "health" goals, it's definitely structured around what I'd like to be able to do, rather than specifics of my body.
For example, one standing goal I've had for a long time is to remain fit enough be able to go out and run a half-marathon more or less on a whim, and still finish in 1:45 or less without hurting too much.
More recently, having moved to 6000' as a home elevation, as well as being very sedentary from work/life stuff, I'd like to be able to keep up runs uphill without stopping, regardless of the pace I'm moving at (currently impossible).
I think structuring things around "what I want to be able to do, and how I want to feel after I do them" is an excellent framework, and far better than "lose N pounds" or "cut X minutes off my time for Y".