Why you don’t need a goal weight
And what you should be setting as fitness goals instead
Setting goals is important when it comes to health and fitness.
There is nothing wrong with wanting to change your body composition, however having a goal weight can set us up for disappointment.
In the short term, weight loss (or weight gain) goals can be important to determine a plan of action.
But when setting our long term or ‘dream’ goals, that number probably isn’t going to be that helpful.
It isn’t always realistic.
If your goal is to lose weight, you might pick a weight goal based on what you were when you were younger and felt more confident.
You might have been that weight when you were younger due to your occupation, a health condition, playing sports, or other lifestyle factors.
In order to get to that weight, that could require huge sacrifices that might leave you feeling restricted and unhappy.
2. Your satisfaction with your body won’t change by reaching a number.
Being a certain body weight doesn’t mean you’ll like how you look, be as fit as you want to be or do the things that you want to achieve. If you tie your worth to a number, often you’ll be disappointed to find that reaching that number doesn’t make you happy with your body.
In fact, most people never do feel completely happy with their bodies no matter how attractive other people might think they are.
Consider your goals as ‘stepping stones’ towards finally achieving the feeling that you are seeking.
This way, you see your goals as more part of the process, and you are less likely to be emotionally affected when you achieve, or don’t achieve those goals.
3. You can change your body composition without losing weight.
It is completely possible to stay the same weight but change your body composition and dramatically change your appearance.
If you have more muscle on your body but less fat, you will look slimmer and more toned, and you will be able to eat more food because your metabolic rate will be higher.
This explains why sometimes the scales won’t seem to line up with the changes you’re seeing in the mirror and the progress you’re achieving in the gym.
4. Even tracking body fat percentage isn’t accurate
Measuring your body fat percentage can be a good starting point to set a realistic body composition goal.
Testing your body fat percentage using the same method regularly helps you check whether you are losing fat or muscle.
But, whatever method of body fat testing you use will have its own set of flaws.
Common testing methods are influenced by a huge range of factors.
The most reliable way to measure body fat percentage is to have a DEXA scan, however this is out of reach for most people.
Other methods you can use include BIA (bioelectrical impedance analysis) and skinfold calipers. These have their limitations but can be a helpful starting reference.
Often, using photographs and taking tape measurements can provide more valuable insight as to whether you are really making progress.
5. Improving your fitness tells more about your progress
Even if your goal never really had much to do with achieving anything specific in the gym, if your goal was to alter your body composition this will require adherence to a structured exercise programme for best results.
Your goal might not have been to gain a certain amount of muscle, but gaining, or at least maintaining muscle is actually an equally important part of the fat loss process.
This comes back to my argument that body composition is worth more consideration than just your weight. If you build some muscle, you probably won’t need to lose as much weight as you thought you did to look a certain way.
Make strength one of your goals, and then building or maintaining muscle will come with it.
If you are making genuine progress in your strength, chances are you are building muscle.
6. Performance often leads to fat loss as a by product
Cardio can help with fat loss by burning calories. When you get started with fitness, you might not actually be burning a lot of calories in those cardio sessions, because you’re not that fit.
However, you can follow a plan with your cardio routines just like you would with your strength training.
By following a plan you can track improvements in your fitness by monitoring your pace and time.
As you become more fit, you will see improvements in your sessions, but you will also be expending more calories during the session, meaning that you will see greater fat loss results from those cardio sessions.
7. You can lose motivation
Focusing on performance keeps your fitness journey fun and interesting.
Because even if you did achieve that weight loss goal, what would happen next?
Chances are, you wouldn’t feel much different than you did the day before.
Even if you don’t have gym-related goals, think about what you want to be able to do in everyday life, what you want to be able to wear and how you want to feel, before you get hung up on that number.
If your goal isn’t going to genuinely make you happy or improve your life in some way, why would you care about it so much?
Conclusion
Tracking your weight and setting short term goals around weight loss can be helpful to set up a plan, but beyond that it is really hard to know what would be a realistic and healthy body weight you will be able to maintain while feeling confident and doing the things that you want to be able to do.
Our surroundings are constantly changing, the weight that you feel good at now (or think that you will) could be very different in five years.
When setting your long term goals, it is better to be less quantitative and just think more about how you want to feel within your body.
When setting short term goals, think of them being ‘stepping stones’. If changing your body composition is important, this will require body fat percentage measurements along with weighing yourself, so setting a short term weight loss goal for that period is justifiable.
All methods of body fat testing do have limitations, sometimes progress images and your performance in the gym tells a better story.
The most important thing to realise is that achieving goals never brings you full satisfaction. You will always feel like you could do better.
Coming to peace with that fact teaches you to enjoy the process more than the result, and will even encourage you to set and achieve more goals along the way because of it.
