Set goals like a boss

I love Pinterest. Seriously, if there was a Pinterest Anonymous club, I would need to join it. But here's what I  absolutely HATE on Pinterest: people posting pictures of super skinny, model-like figures to motivate themselves into working out, eating better, or losing weight. In fact, I immediately stop following any boards that contain those pictures. How often does they really work? Let's give it a try, shall we? Look at her:

Raise your hand if you feel better about yourself now. Anyone feel motivated? You might be motivated right now, but 3 weeks from now when you look at this picture and realize you still don't look like that, you will become discouraged and eat a gallon of ice cream to soothe yourself because "Heck, I'll never look like that, so why bother trying?"

That picture is the ONLY one of it's kind that I will ever put on this blog and I only did it to prove at point. That looking at pictures of skinny girls is not going to ever motivate you enough to change. Want to know why hardly anyone gets those kind of results? There are a couple reasons, but the biggest one is a shocker- WE ALL HAVE DIFFERENT BODIES. Therefore, no matter how much we work out, chances are we are not going to look like Barbie doll there. A healthy weight for you most likely does not look like that. You know this to be especially true if you've had children. Labor and purple striae do wonderful things to a woman's body. The point is, stop trying to look like Barbie face and just try to look like a healthy you!

So if you're not supposed to set a goal based on what someone else looks like, how are you supposed to set goals? For me, it was easy. I simply reached for pre-pregancy weight because I already knew that was a healthy weight for me. If you don't know what you should weigh, a quick way to figure it out is to check your BMI. This measures your height and weight to give you a certain number. A healthy BMI is anywhere from 20-25. More than that is overweight and less than that is underweight. So strive for somewhere in that number range. Here is the link to a BMI calculator to help you figure it out.

http://www.nhlbisupport.com/bmi/

A non-weight related goal is also something you should strive for. Confession: I am a big BIGGEST LOSER fan. Love that show. In this past season, my favorite part was when one of the contestants went home and said to her family, "I weigh blah-blah-blah, I've lost blah-blah pounds, and I am no longer a Type 2 diabetic". Holy crap. That's amazing! She overcame a chronic disease because she lost weight and became healthier. That kind of goal is much more meaningful and impressive than Ms 8-pack's stomach there. I hope you understand how cool that is, because it's freaking awesome!

Weight loss and a healthy lifestyle is going to take a lot of motivation. I'm not talking about a week's worth of motivation, but a lifetime of motivation. You can use how much weight you've lost to motivate yourself, but in the end, that's not what you should care about. You should care about your awesome blood pressure, your strong heart, your strong bones, how much more energy you have and how great you feel! That is what keeps me going. Let the fact that 90% of people I saw in the hospital were overweight motivate you.

Be careful about how you achieve your goals though. Like I said this blog is not a weight-loss program. I don't believe an online blog can do that because our bodies will all react differently to what we do. But this blog is a collection of general health tips to follow. Pick one thing to work on and when you've mastered that, move on to another. You are not going to be the perfect model of health in a month or even 6 months. And if you try to run and workout and stretch and eat veggies every day and eliminate desserts, you will get discouraged and then...hello ice cream. One thing at a time. Simplicity at it's finest.

One last warning about setting goals- creating excuses. Excuses get in your way :-( Let me tell you, post-pregnancy, I had every excuse in the book, yet I didn't let that stop me. Take a look.

Excuses:

- I have no time: I was a nursing student, housewife, new mother, and my husband worked a crazy schedule, so I often was like a single mother.

-I have no money- My husband was working a crazy schedule, but that doesn't mean we had crazy money. There was nothing in the budget for gym memberships

-I wasn't seeing immediate results- After losing a bit of water weight, it still took me a while to lose the 40 lbs extra I had. At an average, I was losing a pound a week and that's all.

-I'm in poor health- I was having trouble with my blood pressure and my heart rhythm for a while last year. I was passing out 2-3x/day and it was difficult to maintain fitness.

My advice is to put away the Barbie pictures, put away the excuses, set some realistic goals and then you are ready to roll!