Weight Regain and SMART Goals: Are You Solving the Right Problem?

A weight-loss goal can sound very clear:

I want to lose 15 kilos.

Analyse your own weight loss goals using the weight goal analysis download and keep reading.

You know your starting weight. You know the number you want to reach. The bathroom scales can tell you whether you’re getting closer.

But a precise weight-loss goal doesn’t necessarily mean you’ve clearly defined the problem you’re trying to solve.

Imagine three women who each want to lose 15 kilos. One wants less pressure on a painful knee. Another wants to look different for a school reunion. The third believes losing weight will change how she feels about her body.

Their numerical goal is identical, but they are trying to achieve very different things.

Once all three are described simply as wanting to lose weight, those differences disappear. The problem becomes 15 kilos, so the obvious solution becomes something designed to remove 15 kilos: usually a diet.

What are you expecting weight loss to deliver?

There’s a useful way to examine your own weight goal. Finish this sentence:

When I lose the weight, I’ll...

Perhaps you’ll feel more confident. You might worry less about your health, wear clothes you’ve stopped wearing or feel comfortable being photographed again.

Whatever comes after the I’ll matters because you’ve named something you expect weight loss to deliver. It may be quite different from losing weight itself.

So when you say, I want to lose 15 kilos, there can be two goals sitting inside that statement: the weight you want to reach and the change in your life you expect reaching that weight to produce. The two can become so closely linked that we stop examining whether one can actually deliver the other.

Weight regain is a complex problem

This distinction becomes particularly important for women with repeated weight regain.

Weight regain is a complex problem. Yet the goals we give it are often remarkably simple: lose 10 kilos, reach 70 kilos, fit into a size 12.

Once the problem has been translated into a number, it becomes easy to find a diet designed to change that number. But changing one part of a complex problem doesn’t necessarily change everything connected to it.

The limitation of SMART weight-loss goals

SMART goals make goals specific, measurable, achievable, relevant and time-bound.

For example:

I will lose 10 kilograms in 16 weeks by eating 1,500 calories a day and exercising five times a week.

It’s certainly precise. But SMART goals can make a weight-loss goal more precise; they can’t tell you whether you’re solving the right problem.

If you start with I need to lose 10 kilos, making that goal specific and measurable doesn’t add the information that was left out. It simply makes a simple goal for a complex problem look more convincing.

The scales have the same limitation. They can tell you whether you lost 10 kilos. They cannot tell you whether losing those kilos delivered the confidence, health improvement, body acceptance or other outcome you expected from them.

For women living with repeated weight regain, this opens up a different starting point. Instead of moving immediately from a weight goal to another diet, we can examine what we’re actually expecting weight loss to change.

Because once a complex problem has been translated into lose 15 kilos, finding a diet for it is relatively easy.

Understanding the problem that sits behind that number requires a different kind of investigation.