Latest / Cameron's Conversations: The last weight loss podcast you'll ever need. / Episode 89: Why you should set yourself ambitious goals
Transcript
- Cameron: Welcome to the Cameron's Conversations Podcast. And in today's episode, I want to talk about why you should set yourself ambitious goals. So, one of the things that I see a lot of when it comes to whether it's weight loss or fitness is that people will set goals, but they will be super, super, super cautious with the goals that they set simply because they don't have the confidence they're going to achieve them. So For example, someone will say, I'm gonna try and drop a couple of kilos. And that's great. That can be a really good starting point and it can be a really, really good way of kind of milestoning it is to say, okay, well, I maybe want to lose six kilos in total. I'm gonna focus on dropping the next two. That works really well. But if dropping two kilos is the only goal you can have initially set yourself when you very first start, the problem is is sometimes that's not compelling enough. It's not enough, right? If I look back to the kind of start of this year and I say, okay, I'm gonna drop two kilos, it nudges me in the right direction, but it probably doesn't excite me. I don't feel super motivated about where it gets me to. Whereas when I kind of set out and was like, right, okay, I'm gonna probably push to about 72 kilos, because I know I don't just feel good at 72 kilos, I feel brilliant. Like I feel really, really good in my clothes, I feel like I'm really comfortable with my top off, like all these kind of things. The things that matter perhaps more to me, like coming into like summer months. time of year, like these kind of things, for me there's a bit of a performance focus as well. Being a bit lighter impacts my basketball in a positive way. So there's a few examples in there, right? That's a bit exciting to me. I know I can achieve it. It's not unreasonable. You know, if I was to say, I'll go for 65 kilos, I'd be an actual skeleton. So that wouldn't be a good goal. That'd be silly. And equally, if I'd kind of said to myself, okay, I'm just gonna try and drop two kilos, well, it just wouldn't have been that compelling, right? I wouldn't have been that excited about it. And I think this is a really nice to think to think about is whether it's a fitness goal where you sort of say to yourself, right, I'm gonna go and I'm gonna do a half marathon in six months' time, or whether it is ⁓ a different kind of fitness goal around strength. Like, I'd love to deadlift my own body weight, or if you get to your own body weight, you're like, I would love to deadlift one and a half times my own body weight, or to press the whatever dumbbells it is, maybe it's a 14 kilo dumbbells, and you're only on tens right now. You set yourself a goal, and it gives you that drive and that motivation to really push for it. Because a lot of the time, what happens is with really, really small goals, you can almost dip your toe a little bit where you'll be like, Okay, well, I want to lose a couple kilos. Okay, well, it's only a couple kilos, so I can take it quite. Quite easy. I don't need to change too much. I'll just kind of like very much ease into it. Now there are pros to that approach to some extent, but the problem is you also then tend to start to negotiate with yourself. So instead of me being like, right, okay, I'm gonna get down to 72, that means dropping like over 10 kilos. How am I gonna do that? Okay, I need to plan this out, I need to be quite disciplined. This is how much weight I need to be losing on average. So, you know, this is what I should be losing over a month, roughly, to keep me on track, and then I'll build in a bit of wiggle room for like holidays and stuff, so just being on holiday. So I would factor that in. I wouldn't say to myself, okay, I've got exactly six weeks and that I need to be at this perfect pace and if I don't do that I'm gonna miss my goal. I would try and build in a couple of weeks of Slack. But What's really, really useful is it it stops you negotiating with yourself. I now have a window where my goal is to get to 72 kilos over the next eight weeks. I've given myself between six and eight, eight being the kind of upward limit of it. So I know the pace I need to go at, which also means I know the calories I need to be sitting at and the fact that I need to be consistent with my steps. Because if I was open-ended and I was like, okay, I want to be down to, let's say, 72 kilos by the end of this year, that would be fine. And it's still a good goal and I would still progress towards it. But Would it matter to me so much if I missed my step count that day? Yeah, probably not. Like as an example, like I was under my steps on Monday. I actually just bought a walking pad that arrived on Monday, so I only got a little short chance to use it for about 10 minutes. But it's been really helpful and sort of choosing Wednesday so far. But one of the things that's that's a really key there is with my steps, I'm really conscious of missing them on Monday. So yesterday I caught up an extra 1500. Tuesday's still a very big work day for me, so I wasn't gonna catch up all the steps I needed to do because I was about 60. Under, but I've chipped away at it. And today I have a little bit more time. So I've got a few calls. So I'm gonna be on the walk walking pad to do those calls. That'll bring me up to kind of hit my normal day target. And then if I go for a walk this evening, that should pull me up to maybe catch up, maybe three, four thousand steps. So I'll be just shy of where it was. I'm quite mindful of that because I'm holding myself to that standard. I'm not stressed about it, I'm not kind of beating myself up about it. I'm pragmatic about the fact you know, first day back from holiday was a Monday, I was non stop. Like I started a laptop at six and it finished at half seven. That was reality. I had like a half hour break the whole day. But The reality is is that you can be too sort of generous with yourself or you can start to negotiate too much. ⁓ well, it doesn't ha matter if I have this weekend off tracking, or if I have, you know, a few days off here and there and I'll just not bother this week. I'm just gonna just gonna have a week off. I'm a bit tired of tracking, you know, I can't really be bothered this week. And it's like that stuff all sounds good and sounds completely reasonable, but the problem is it is so bloody easy to talk yourself out of it. And really, with your weight loss, what we want to do is get the job done. Now, if you've got a bigger weight loss, the reality is it still might take you quite a while. But a lot of the time, if it isn't a huge weight loss, you can get it done in a not a short time or time frame, but a relatively short time frame. And doing that, being more relaxed, having a weekend off here and there, you know, then having a holiday, then there's a Friday, you just forgot to track. It all adds up. And it means that you may be adding 20, 25% to how long the diet lasts. That can really, really drag it out. A 16-week diet now becomes a 20-week plus diet. So on and so forth as well. So something that's really, really useful is being ambitious with your goals, being very specific with them as well. Now, where that goes wrong a little bit is people can be ambitious but not realistic. So they'll say to say, you know, I'm gonna drop one and a half kilos a week. Cool. So what you need to do is figure out your maintenance calories and ask if you can strip 1500 calories a day off that. Now, if you're a small female and you're on 2100 calories, you're on six hundred calories a day. That ain't gonna work. Like that's just not gonna happen. Whereas for someone who is like a six foot six male and really active, could they do that? Yeah, maybe, maybe a hard push, a hard push. They could probably sustain it for a good few weeks, but that would really be it. I would be surprised if they could sustain it for three months to four months, example. So, one of the things that I think is really, really important is we want to be intentional and deliberate with the way we set these targets and these goals. Obviously, we need to be realistic. And I've talked before about the number, but like most people can drop about 0.5 to 1% of their body weight per week. So if you imagine that for me right now, that might be somewhere in the region of like, we'll just say for simplicity's sake, because though I was 80 kilos still, like 0.4 kilos to 0.8 kilos a week, I can maybe say, right, okay, well, I'm gonna aim for 0.8 kilos per week. Right. I'm gonna push quite hard. I'm gonna do that. And I've got, let's say, five kilos to drop. So if I give myself six to eight weeks, that's a reasonable time frame to do that. Like it's reasonable to think, especially because I've a little bit of holiday weight drop-off. That's a sensible kind of approach to it. But what's really important is your goal has to compel you and it has to be exciting and you have to remember why you're doing it. So for me, it's not about the number on the scales. Like the number on the scales is a target, yes, but it's how I feel at 72 kilos. I know for me, and this is all relative to height, amount of muscle mass you have, all the rest of it. I know for me, I perform really well at a sport I really enjoy playing. So I feel good there. I also know that I feel like or I look really really good or how I feel myself. I feel really, really happy with my body composition typically around about that way. It might be that I get 73 and a half and I'm like, hey, I'm actually happy. I built some muscle here. I'm quite happy where I am. That's cool. But I know that that's that's kind of the rough target. But it's about how I feel day to day. That's actually the focal point. And I think that's really really useful to remember is when you are setting these goals, make them compelling. Be a little bit excited about it. Then you set that goal and then you might milestone it from there. You kind of reverse engineer it. The start of the year when I was sitting at 85, I was like, okay, cool. Like I've done this muscle gain phase for 14 months now. I've gotten stronger. I've definitely added muscle in the places I wanted to add muscle. So I'm quite happy with that. That's cool. But I also don't absolutely love the way it looks. So I want to get to a point where I love the way I look again. Okay, well, let's set an ambitious goal for that. And that's exactly kind of how I've approached it and how I'd encourage you to approach it too. So have a little bit of a think about that, but focus not just on the number on the scales, because I've mentioned the number on the scales a bit. But that's just as I say, like ⁓ is to give me data, right? But really what I'm looking for is I'm looking for how do I feel? What what's compelling about that? Well, what's compelling about it for me is I know if I put on a shirt, I'm gonna look really good in that shirt. I know that I've got a friend's wedding coming up, like one of my best friends' weddings that I'm best man at. So I know that I want to like feel really good for that as well. And again, I'm not someone who's hyper self-conscious, to be quite frank with you. I'm not. It's not something I focus on overly day-to-day. I'm not worried or thinking about it, but I'm also, like every other human, want to look and feel good for it, right? And I know that around that way I feel really bloody good. Like I remember being at one of my other friends' weddings and and being about 75k. Kilos and I felt great for that. I know that that's probably a sensible place for me to be. So that that's part of it as well, is like having these little external kind of goals and lots of minor things, but it was more about how I feel day to day when I wake up and look in the mirror. That's that's what it's really about, and how I feel energy-wise, and how I feel in terms of performance in the basketball court or when I go for a run or whatever it is as well. ⁓ admittedly, the the running performance is probably a little bit lower of my performance ⁓ my ⁓ priorities, but that's quite a nice way of thinking about it. So when you do set your goal. Goals, be a bit ambitious with it. Set something that compels you, that excites you. That might be feeling comfortable when you go on holiday. It might be something as simple as that, a common one. Or it could be just not feeling like you have to diet for a long time. That's a great goal. You know, getting to a weight where you feel like actually I just feel comfortable with myself. I don't feel like I need to lose any more weight. That can be a good goal in itself, is to get to a point where you're like, ⁓ I feel quite happy. Like I want to focus on my training and my fitness now. And it's really nice not to think about dieting for six, twelve 18 to 24 months, however long it is, right? But you don't even have to think about it. That can be a great goal too. So that's just some thoughts from my that popped into my head ⁓ earlier today when I was thinking a little bit about goal setting. And I think that's really important is be a little ambitious. You can achieve far more than you think you can, especially if you lean into it. If you really lean into it, it can make all the difference in the world. So hopefully that was helpful. If you have any suggestions for future episodes, please feel free to pop me a message on the WhatsApp link that is in the show notes. Otherwise, have a great week and speak soon.