timetable

Select a timetable for the attainment of your goal. Predicting the rate at which weight loss will occur, through caloric restriction and increased physical activity, will take some calculation and some imagination on your part. Without a timetable to plot your course, it will be difficult to make firm connections between the fading past and the unseen future. To make this association more explicit, keep a logbook of your dieting progress. Although these dieting diaries are sometimes viewed as tedious, pencil-pushing exercises, they’re quite valuable, not only for charting progress but also for reviving spirits that flag and re-energizing motivation that founders. Besides, it can be fun—perhaps even educational—to read them in later months or years. Another way to track your progress is to get a piece of poster board and tack it lengthwise to a wall that only you will see. Draw a horizontal line across the center of the poster, and write your present weight at the far left side of the line and your goal weight at the far right side. Make tick marks on the line to indicate the weeks or months when you’ll be “weighing in” or otherwise checking your progress. This will serve as a timeline, which you can use to visually track where you are now and where you should be at the end of each week or month of your journey. Your weekly weigh-ins will keep you aware of your progress. Based upon the degree of your intermediate successes, you can either reward yourself or adopt whatever self-correcting behavior you need in order to achieve your goal on schedule. Step Four. Decide what you’ll do to prevent relapses in your program—and to meet them head-on if they occur. To accomplish this step, you’ll need to deliberate and make contracts with yourself. Much of what you have done in your dieting past has been correct. Repeating your past dieting successes will bring you even closer to victory this time.