Creating a Weight Loss Roadmap vs. Aiming for Results

Here’s a secret from the world’s most successful athletes, business people, and thinkers:

If you’re working toward a desired result, you should set a goal…then forget about it.

We mean it. Stop worrying about the result. Instead, you need to focus on the actions that get you to the result. See, when we navigate toward a destination, we’re not thinking about the final parking spot. Instead, we’re focused like a laser on the next step. If you’re making a trip across the country, you’re not thinking about the last exit nearly as much as you’re thinking about the next exit.

We’re Never More Effective Than When We’re On a Road Trip

How often do you decide to drive to Starbucks and only get halfway there? How often do you go to visit relatives out-of-town and end up at the wrong spot? We’d wager almost never! For most of us, getting in our car and driving to a destination is the single most effective goal-setting we’ll achieve this year. And the amazing thing is, we do it without thinking.

Why is our Road Trip Mindset so effective? Because on every trip, we a.) create a plan, and b.) focus solely on the next step of the plan—not the end.

Most of us never reach our weight loss goals because we’re not thinking about the next step; we’re focused on a result that’s 3 weeks, 3 months, or even 3 years away. But without executing the next step on our journey, we end up falling far short of what we aimed for.

How to Make a Road Map to Your Goal Weight

Instead of marking down the pounds until your goal weight, you need to create a list of development markers that will take you there. Putting down “Lose 3 pounds” in your weekly planner is focusing on the result (and you can’t control your result directly anyway). Instead, put “Drink 64 oz. of water per day” on your to-do list—an action you can control that you know will take you to your destination.

Here are other development markers you could put on your Roadmap:

• Plan 5 home-cooked meals a week
• Replace 1 can of soda with 1 bottled water
• Eat 1 serving of low-carb vegetables
• Go to the gym 3 times every week

These are each actions that you take, rather than results that you hope for. If you focus solely on drinking water (like yesterday’s blog discusses), you will lose weight. That’s the idea: to focus on what you need to do right now so that you’re not obsessing (pointlessly) over the destination.

The best part? The more you focus on what’s next, the faster you’ll get to the end (which brings its own challenges…but you don’t need to worry about that right now!)