Jim Katsoulis (YouTube) explains how to choose a motivating, realistic goal weight. He advises against picking an arbitrary number from the past (e.g., weight at 20 or at marriage) that may be emotionally linked to repeated failure. Instead, choose a target that gives you the best quality of life and that you are willing to live and eat at. Consider current life stress and resources—don’t set an extremely low weight when you lack the capacity to maintain the behaviors required. Allow increasing a goal weight if it makes the target feel more doable and motivating.
Chapters
How to choose the perfect goal weight. If you're like most of my clients, you're choosing a goal weight that's not really inspiring to you. You're probably choosing a number that you've been saying for decades. It's probably based on the weight you were when you were 20 years old, or when you were about to get married, or when you lost all that weight on Weight Watchers decades ago. And you've been saying the same number since. And at this point, it doesn't really have any meaning to it other than when every time I say that number, I never achieve it. So it's kind of linked to failure. So the first thing you want to do is to realize that your goal weight that you really want to live at is how do you pick it? What is the right number? Right. We could go by a BMI chart. We have a doctor tell us, how do you choose the right number that's really gonna be the most motivating to you? And I would suggest you choose the number and the weight that's gonna give you the best quality of life. Now, in order to figure out what that is, we have to understand that your weight doesn't live in a vacuum. You can't just pick the lowest number you can think of, because you have to realize you have to live and eat a certain way in order to achieve that. And a lot of people are choosing a weight that they're not willing to live and eat at. And so there becomes this subconscious incongruence, this battle. And so what you wanna do is you wan weight that you are willing to live and eat at, because this is part of the equation. And so if you're in a stressful, frustrating, hard time of life, I wouldn't choose the lowest weight, because you probably don't have the mental, physical resources to make that happen. So pick a weight that's more doable in the situation that you're in. And always keep in mind that as you go through your weight loss process to take into account not just the weight that you want to reach that number, but take into account how challenging and difficult it is for you to achieve it and make that part of the equation. And it's not the worst thing in the world to increase your goal weight. Sometimes that is the thing that really triggers people to start getting real results, because it feels more real, it feels more doable. So start reflecting on your goal weight and ask yourself the question, which weight is going to give me the best quality of life? It's not just about how you look. It's about how you're living. It's about how you feel. It's about who you are as a person at that weight. So start to expand your idea of what the right goal weight is. And once you have the right goal weight, the whole process becomes easier because you feel genuinely motivated.
