Can you use weight loss as a goal?

Some if not most of you are going to get very upset with my next statement. Using weight loss as a goal for better fitness is not good and you are setting yourself up for failure from the beginning. Now that I have said that let me give you my reasoning.

Let me ask you a question, if you weigh 125 pounds and you keep losing 2 pounds a week how long before you would evaporate? I know it sounds foolish but how many time s have you heard from that 22 year old person that they lost 2 pounds that day. Or that 45 year old who said that they have lost 5 pounds in a week. To me when I hear that it is like finger nails on a chalk board and I just want to tell them that it may be a great thing to say for marketing their product but bad for our health and fitness.

Now let me ask you another question, let’s assume that you do reach that weight goal you put out there, now what? How do you maintain that? Do you stop eating? Do you carry around a scale checking your weight every hour on the hour? Of course you don’t and to be honest with you, you will never be able to achieve that magic number and keep it there. You body weight will always fluctuate up and down and never stay in one constant place.

Now here are the problems with using weight your fitness goal;

1) You will become frustrated and after a while just give up.
How many of us live and die by what the scale says? “Hey I am having a great day today I lost 5 pounds.” Or “I could tell this morning I was going to have a bad day I and up 5 pounds”. This is not good and will always give you bad mood swings.

2) You will constantly be thinking about food.
Now let’s assume that you do hit that magic number. Now you begin the process of trying to stay there. So what is the first thing you do but think about your food and now you think about it a lot. It becomes an obsession and you are always hungry.

3) You may become obsessed with food.
Now you are hungry all the time. You walk by a deli or restaurant and all you think about is eating. You feel as though for you to keep at this ridicules weight you can’t eat any more or as much. Now what happens is that you begin to lose the fight after a while and you begin to put that weight back on plus more.

4) You will think of food as the enemy.
You blame the calories and the food you are eating for your weight gain when it is not it fault. You see we are stuck in a dilemma here, we need food to survive and if we don’t eat we die. Trust me many people have tried to stop eating and it did not get them too far. You begin to look at that hamburger as the enemy or that chicken sandwich as the guilty pleasure. Guys, we need calories to burn the energy we need every day and get the vitamins to the organs. Calories are our friend not enemy. Now too many calories, that’s a different story.

5) It could lead to some very bad disorders.
Bulimia, Anorexia, Osteoporosis and so many other problems can come from you think that your weight is not what YOU think it should be. Have you ever drawn a picture of yourself? The funny thing is that how you see yourself most others don’t see you in that same way. You think you are fat but another person sees you as the perfect specimen. We all have a warped sense of what we look like. Our minds eye does fool us in this case.

Losing weight should be a by-product of you achieving physical goals. Let’s use running as an example. Let’s say that right now you can run a 12 minute mile and your goal is to get yourself down to 8 minute miles. Don’t you think that once you have achieved that you have lost a few pounds? I would think so. Now here is the one million dollar question. Now let’s say that you do achieve that 8 minute mile and now you maintain that running speed for months on end. Do you think you maintained your lower weight? I think so. Now you have something tangible to gage yourself on. If you slow down and feel sluggish then you probably have gain some weight and gotten yourself out of peak form. Now, I know that I will have some people that will say that they are not runners; this is only meant as an example. You can use other things like getting off of your medications, if it is weight induced. You can bike further or swim further and quicker. Just get your mind off of your weight. If you don’t you are setting yourself up for failure in a big way.