If you're new here, you may want to subscribe to my RSS feed. Thanks for visiting!

Last year I set some goals to lose weight. I had a goal to meet because my wife and I were going to to on a cruise. I was blogging about dieting at the time. Here’s one of my old posts. It’s about the importance of following a plan that you believe will get you to your goal. Here are some excerpts from that post.

“Wow, one week of my diet is done and I’m not tired, I’m not emaciated, I’m not frantic…I just feel normal! I didn’t weigh myself all week because I am working to keep my focus on executing my plan and not on the weight loss. If I focus on executing the plan I’m confident the pounds will come off.”

“But, I did weigh myself this morning. I figure once a week is a good idea, just to know.”

“I lost five pounds. My first reaction? I was a bit disappointed! That was an emotional reaction. Typically, when I’ve dieted, my focus was on losing X pounds as quickly as possible so I could get back to eating “normally.” My first week on the Adkins diet I lost seven or eight pounds. So, my emotional reaction was one of a little disappointment. Then my brain kicked in. My goal for the entire month of January was eight pounds. Five pounds is a little over half of that. Five pounds is actually pretty good!”

“The big thing is not the number of pounds lost, the big thing is to work the plan and let it work. I’m confident it will, so how am I doing on that?”

“The exercise part is going well, but that’s sort of routine after three years anyway. I did miss walking one morning because I simply overslept. Getting up early has never been my thing. (You could ask my mother!) I must have shut the alarm off without even consciously knowing it. I’ve done that many times with the snooze button, but rarely do I hit the little cancel button without knowing what I’m doing! I did get up the next day and walked in a 47 degree drizzle with a light breeze (not warm!). So, I walked five days out of the six. I’m not worried about that part of the plan though. As I said, it is pretty much routine.”

“How did I do on the 1,800 calories a day? Surprisingly, it was much easier than I expected! In fact, some days I have to be sure to eat a little extra in the evening because I want to be sure to maintain a steady caloric intake so my body gets used to knowing what to expect. My wife has used Weight Watchers in the past and they emphasized the importance of doing that. I had at least 1,750 calories every day and never over 1,800. I never “felt hungry” when it wasn’t time to eat but I did notice consciously breaking some habits.”

“Overall, it was a good week. I can work the plan and I’m beginning to get some feedback that the plan is working. I’ll give you another progress report next week and I’ll do some posting over the weeks ahead about breaking those habits and what those habits were doing to me calorie-wise.”

The reason I’m repeating this post here is to emphasize that, while goals are important, we need to have a plan to reach the goals. If we know we have a good, workable, reliable plan we can be confident that we will move toward the goal. At this point we need to focus on working the plan faithfully. Keep the goal in mind, but concentrate on executing the plan!

If you like this blog post, please share it with a friend by Digg-ing it and adding it to StumbleUpon. We sure would appreciate it!