Tag Archives: weight loss goals

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My Alexa Skills Update

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So, I’ve been pretty busy since my last Alexa Skills update! I’m now up to 25 with the certification of Recall The Date by Amazon on March 30, 2021.

Here are my 4 most recent Alexa Skills with a description of each.  Below that you’ll find a link to the updated list with the Skill Names, Descriptions, and Quick Links to find the Skill in your Alexa App.

What Should I Weigh – What Should I Weigh lets you determine in which of the 4 Weight Status Categories developed by the CDC you belong based on your height and weight. If you aren’t in the normal weight category, it calculates your normal weight range and tells you the minimum number of pounds you need to gain or lose to get within the normal range.  It will also give you nutrition and exercise tips, as well as activities you can do to burn the number of calories you specify.

Your Weight Loss Friend – Your Weight Loss Friend provides powerful tools for anyone on their journey to successful weight loss based on where they are on that journey.  Successful weight loss requires changing your eating and exercise habits.  Many experts in behavior change believe there are several Stages of Change through which a person moves as they work towards healthier habits.  Your Weight Loss Friend uses this approach to organize tools to help the user on their weight loss journey. Users can develop their Weight Loss Plan, log their Weights and Exercises, schedule Healthy Text Messages about nutrition, schedule Email Messages to help them move through the Stages of Change, learn what is a healthy weight for their height, schedule Weigh-In & Exercise Reminders, and get information about BMI, the Stages of Change, and more.

Grampa Wisdom – Grampa Wisdom is a humorous glimpse into some of the sayings and quotes as remembered by the developer of this skill, a Grampa himself. Those recollections are not always the sayings with which you may be familiar, but they are meant to be fun.

Recall The Date – Recall The Date is an easy way to log and retrieve the dates of the birthdays and anniversaries of your friends and relatives. After you have logged some, you can retrieve events for a given month or by the next number of weeks you specify.  It will also tell you whether there is an event for the day you open it, as well as when the next event you have logged will occur. These features will occur accurately for Time Zones within the United States and Canada and will be adjusted for Daylight Savings Time through 2030.

Click the link below to go to a table of my Alexa Skills or click the Download button on the right to download its PDF file:

Dr. Bob Alexa Skills March 31, 2021Download

Motivation – The Key To Reaching Your Goal

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Changing any behavior, especially ones associated with our daily lifestyle habits, will take a lot of energy and work.  Everyone has great intentions when they first start a weight loss program or stop smoking.  As they get into the program and realize the difficulty, they often rethink whether it will be worth it.  This is where they need to draw from the strength of their motivation for starting to make these changes in the first place.

In my opinion, it is best to identify your motivations while you are in the planning stage, before you start making your changes.  You need to clearly identify why you are committing yourself to the work involved in changing your target behaviors.  You should write this and all components of your change plan down in a notebook or keep it on your computer so you can refer to it later.

Motivations come in all shapes and sizes.  They can be related to improving one’s health, looking better, being more attractive to one’s partner or wanting to see one’s daughter get married.  They can be somewhat abstract, such as, “I want to feel better” or much more concrete, such as, “I want to stop smoking so I can avoid hospitalizations for my lung disease.”  Motivations can be relatively trivial or much more serious, such as, “My husband thinks I’m too fat, and the spark is gone from our marriage.”  These are common reasons for people to want to change their behaviors.

Again, as you begin to make your behavior change plan, you should identify and write down your motivations. Over the following months as you make the necessary changes you will be faced with barriers to your success.  The strength of your motivations will help you conquer those barriers.  The more meaningful the motivation is for you, the greater its power.

Goals are often related to motivations.  For smoking, it is to completely stop smoking by a specified date.  For the woman who wants to be able to wear a certain bathing suit when she and her husband go to the Bahamas in July, her goal is to lose a specific number of pounds by a specific date, the date her trip begins.

A lot has been written about the characteristics a goal should have.  The concept of SMART goals identifies the key characteristics.  There are some differing thoughts as to what each of the 5 letters stand for, but here is one that makes sense for what we are discussing:

  • Specific – What needs to happen by the goal date for the goal to be met?  For smoking, it is usually complete smoking cessation.  For weight loss, it is losing a certain number of pounds or weighing a certain amount.
  • Measurable – It needs to be something that you will clearly know that it has been attained or not.
  • Attainable – The goal can be reached taking into account the goal date.  Losing 50 pounds in one month is just not safely attainable.
  • Relevant – It is relevant to you and your condition and circumstance.  This often ties in with motivation.
  • Timebound – There is a specific target date when the goal is to be attained.

As you prepare your plan be sure to use these characteristics in writing your goal. 

Please add your comments on these topics or share some of the motivations you’ve used to reach your own goals.

For Your Health – Dr. Bob