I had a few more thoughts on milestones that I wanted to share.  When setting targets for your weight loss milestones you don’t necessarily have to use weights.  Since a weight loss program combines making changes in your eating habits and your activity level, there are many none weight targets that you can use.  In fact many people find that concentrating on changing the behaviors that will lead to reaching their goal weight to be a better strategy than just focusing on their ultimate weight loss goal.  After all, attaining a 50 pound weight loss will take time, but a milestone tied to changing some aspect of your eating habits can be reached much sooner.  For instance, let’s say that snacks are your downfall, and you typically eat 6 unhealthy snacks every evening while sitting at the computer or watching TV.  A milestone for you could be to eliminate 1 evening snack per week for the next 5 weeks.  By the end of those 5 weeks you will have decreased your snacks to one each evening and hit that milestone.  At the same time you need to improve the healthfulness of the snacks and not increase the amount of each snack.

Once you reach your milestone, you reward yourself.  This brings up the other point I wanted to make about using milestones.  You can choose any reward except food.  So, buy a new pair of shoes or go out to a play or movie, but don’t go out to dinner or have an extra slice of pie for dessert.

Finally, it should be obvious that when you use the attainment of a changed behavior as a goal as in our example, you need to continue that behavior and build on it.  Most experts say that you need to work at maintaining that behavior change for at least six months before you can consider it part of your lifestyle.  With that in mind, you may want to set monthly milestones that you will maintain the new healthier behavior that you adopted in order to prevent backsliding.  And that brings us to the topic I’ll talk about next time – backsliding.

Meanwhile be sure to set attainable milestones for your behavior change program, whether for weight loss or smoking.  It’ll make it more fun as you chart your progress towards your goal.

For Your Health – Dr. Bob