Get Tips For Your New Year Resolution to Lose Weight in 2022!
Are you looking for tips for your New Year’s resolution to lose weight? Resolutions are full of promise, possibility, and permanence, yet so often they fizzle out before realizing their full potential.
Focus on Improving Your New Year’s Resolution to Lose Weight by Using Two Goal Setting Tools:
- Set both outcome and process goals, and
- Put SMART goals to work.
An outcome goal focuses on achieving something, like losing weight. On their own, outcome goals are motivating, but they can also be vague and hard to stick to. Process goals pick up the slack by focusing on the specific actions that will help you to reach the desired outcome.
Start with one process goal… New Year’s Resolution To Lose Weight in 2022!
For example, you may resolve to drink a warm herbal tea after dinner, as a way to avoid late night snacking. Or to put it another way, the outcome goal (avoiding snacking) is the WHAT and the process goal (drinking tea) is the HOW.
When looking at your personal New Year’s resolution, start by thinking of a motivating and meaningful outcome (e.g. losing weight, improving health), then work backward to create an effective plan by using the following acronym:
S – Specific: make your goal as specific as possible. Identify exactly what you want to achieve. Instead of the very general statement “I want to lose weight”, consider the more specific goal “I will lose 15 pounds for my trip to Mexico in May.”
M – Meaningful: connect your goals to to your personal values. For example, “Losing weight will help me feel better, look better, and result in healthier eating habits, which will improve my long-term health.”
A – Action oriented: give yourself something to accomplish, instead of focusing on avoiding or not doing something. “Each night I will prep and organize my meals and snacks for the next day.”
R – Realistic: is your goal realistic? If you think the odds of achieving your goal are over 90%, you are on track; if it feels less than 90%, tweak the goal to make it more achievable. You can always make it more challenging later. “Yes, I have the food at home already and can take 5 minutes each night to organize.”
T – Trackable: how will you keep track of your progress? Think about a realistic timeline, e.g. “in one week I am 90% confident that I could accomplish (blank) two times and I will track this by (blank)”. This helps keep focus and motivation high. For example: “I will track my weight by weighing myself first thing Friday morning and tracking it on my wall calendar. Each night that I prep my lunch, I will put a smiley face on my wall calendar to track my progress.”
Here is how your resolution might look, with all of these tools in place:
Final outcome goal – For my New Year’s resolution to lose weight, I want to lose 3 pounds a month to reach my goal of 15 pounds lost in time for my trip to Mexico at the end of May. I will weigh myself first thing every Friday morning and record this on my wall calendar.
Process goal – Every night I will prep and organize my meals and snacks for the next day using food I already have at home, and I will track this goal by putting a smiley face on my wall calendar each day I accomplish this goal.
To maximize your success in 2022, start with one process goal. Once you have achieved this, take the next step and set your next goal like a New Year’s Resolution to Lose Weight!