10 Reasons Why Your Weight Loss Goals Backfire
You may believe that the first step you need to take in order to lose weight is to set an ambitious, clearly defined goal…but you’d be wrong.
We’ve been told over and over again that goals are essential, and that the best types of goals are “SMART” goals: Specific, Measurable, Attainable, Relevant, and Time-Bound. An example of a SMART goal would be to lose 15 pounds in 12 weeks.
But what if I told you that the very act of setting a specific weight loss goal to achieve by a certain deadline is likely one of the very things that’s sabotaging your success?
If you truly want to adopt healthy habits and feel at home in your body, you do NOT want to get hung up on a goal weight—or how quickly you’ll get there.
Here are 10 reasons why setting a weight loss goal has been backfiring on you:
1. You’re Too Focused on the Outcome
Most of the time, dieters are focused on one measurement of success: the scale. When the scale goes down, that’s bad. When the scale goes up, that’s good. If the scale doesn’t move in the “correct” direction, the dieter is liable to let it ruin their day.
But is the scale the best measurement of success or failure? Let’s say you added an additional serving of vegetables to your daily intake and took 4 walks this week, but the scale didn’t drop—would you consider your efforts to be a failure?
Additionally, fixation on seeing the scale going down can lead to setting rigid diet rules, which one study described as the “number one psychological predictor of weight loss failure.” [1] These same rigid rules can also lead to rumination on your diet, the feeling that you’re constantly thinking about what to eat and what not to eat.
2. You’re Making Undesirable Tradeoffs
In order to hit a goal, you’ll need to pursue it at the expense of other parts of your life: carving out time to hit the gym or to prep and track your food. There’s no way around that.
But you may feel tempted to pour your efforts into the steps you believe you must take to hit your goal in a way that’s not ultimately serving you. For example, if you work a high-stress job and are operating in a sleep deficit, it might be in your best interest to prioritize rest versus getting in more workouts that you’ll struggle to recover from.
Taken to the extreme, sticking too closely to your initial plans can lead to some physically and emotionally painful tradeoffs, such as a person obsessing over a race despite a nagging injury in their knee, or being unable to attend social events or eat out because of worries about the accuracy of their food tracking.
3. Your Goal is Too Ambitious
Lofty goals can often encourage short-term thinking. For example, setting a goal of losing 20 lbs. by your sister’s wedding next month might prompt you to go on a crash diet—an extreme cutting of calories to induce rapid weight loss.
If you aim to lose too much too quickly, it’s going to necessitate using unsustainable methods of weight loss. Putting yourself into too steep of a caloric deficit or attempting to stick to a diet that you can’t see yourself sticking to for the rest of your life is only inviting an eventual rebound.
In part, this happens because our physiological response to intense hunger is…intense food cravings. But there’s an additional psychological component as well. If you set strict targets for yourself over what to eat or how much to exercise, when you inevitably miss, you label yourself a failure for not fulfilling an impossible task. Rinse and repeat, and you’re going to erode your sense of self-trust and self-efficacy.
4. Your Initial Goal Doesn’t Remain Relevant
The initial goal you set may not be the appropriate one to keep once you begin your journey. When people get overly attached to a goal, it can make them behave irrationally by investing even more effort and resources even though the goal no longer makes sense to pursue.
I have seen individuals chasing a goal weight at the expense of their well-being simply because they didn’t stop to re-evaluate if the goal was still relevant. Rather than deciding if their efforts were worth it, they overinvested time and energy into seeing the number on the scale they chose when they first began their weight loss efforts. Oftentimes this leads to disordered eating habits.
On the flip side, I’ve coached individuals on their food relationships and body image who acknowledged that despite not being at their goal weight (and in some cases, not knowing their weight at all), they felt at peace with their bodies and confident in their nutrition—the results they had been hoping to get from dieting all along.
5. Your Goal is Fostering Anxiety
Goal-setting can be reflective of a fear of uncertainty. Chasing goals can give you a false sense of certainty because you’re investing in a vision of the future that you feel you have control over.
But a fear of uncertainty is one of the primary drivers of anxiety. Rather than having a sense of capability that you’ll be able to handle whatever comes, or in this case, that you’ll allow yourself to feel whole and happy without relying on a specific outcome, anxious individuals predict a future that is dangerous at worst and unpleasant at best.
A chronic fear of uncertainty can lead to an identity of incapability—which can lead to further behaviors that prove incompetence—sabotaging forward progress.
6. Your Goal is Driven By a Lack of Self-Worth
Goal fixation can also be driven by a lack of self-worth or tying your self-worth up in your accomplishments.
An example of a core belief that might drive obsessive goal setting is: “I am not good enough as I am—but I will be if I reach this other place.” As it applies to changing one’s appearance, the most common reason for beginning a diet in the first place:
“My body is not acceptable as it is—but it will be once I weigh less.”
The problem is, even once the goal has been met, an individual with low self-worth still won’t feel good enough, which often leads to them setting further goals—but never feeling worthiness.
7. You’re Using Your Goal to Beat Yourself Up
Dieting is one place where perfectionist tendencies can play out. A sense of failure can emerge either when your self-imposed rules are broken—you eat something off-plan or miss a workout—or you don’t get the scale reading you desire.
Failing to live up to these impossible standards ultimately drives guilt, shame, and self-criticism. Rather than using mistakes as opportunities to learn and grow, the perfectionist uses them as an opportunity to self-flagellate.
Ironically, self-criticism over mistakes often leads to further undesired behaviors. For example, if a person experiences an episode of emotional eating, the guilt and shame they feel as a result can trigger further instances of emotional eating.
8. The Goal Isn’t What You Really Want
Pause for a moment and answer the question, “Why do you want to lose weight?”
Now, I’m going to tell you something you may not believe. Your answer to the question is most likely self-delusion. We tell ourselves certain stories about why we want what we want: because it’s a personal preference or because there are objective benefits.
The truth is, you did not select this goal for yourself. It is not a logical decision you made. You want to look a certain way because of imitation. You want to fit into societal standards. You’ve been influenced by your culture, peer groups, and family, which have shaped your identity.
You’re not dissatisfied with your body because there is something inherently wrong with your body.
You’re unhappy with the way you look because you have been programmed to believe that there is a right and a wrong way to look.
9. You Miscalculate the Future
When you recount your past dieting experiences, do you recall if the process took longer than you expected it to or if you encountered unexpected difficulties along the way? Unrealistic expectations about how quickly you can achieve your goal or the ease of the endeavor can lead to failure when reality fails to meet your overly optimistic expectations.
In addition, you can become overly optimistic about what “future you” will be willing to do. It’s quite common for us to leave eating a healthier meal or executing a workout for a future version of us, so that we can enjoy eating something more indulgent or relaxing on the couch in the present moment. Unfortunately, it’s not likely that future-you will feel any more motivated to take different actions.
10. You Think It Will Solve All Your Problems
The primary reason we set any goal at all is because we believe we will feel better once we achieve it. Many individuals believe that once they achieve their goal physique, they’ll finally feel happy, free, at peace with themselves. Or perhaps they’ll have the attention and admiration they crave, believing it will fill the hole in their heart.
But changing the way you look doesn’t necessarily change the way you feel. Individuals in socially desirable bodies still suffer from body dissatisfaction, mental health struggles, loneliness, and so on.
The distinguishing factor between individuals who are thriving and those who are not is not their bodies. It’s their minds.
So if setting a weight loss goal can sabotage your success, what should you do instead?
Research shows that having a broad sense of direction, rather than setting goals, can drive greater levels of happiness.
That’s why Food Body Self students not only set aside weight loss as their primary goal, they choose North Stars. A North Star gives you a general sense of direction without demanding you decide exactly where you’ll end up, how, or when.
Here are some examples of North Stars by Food Body Self students:
I will build healthy self-care habits.
I will develop healthy coping methods to replace binging.
I will have the capability and confidence to face stressful situations and always be resilient.
In order to become more resilient, rather than developing a burning passion toward a goal that you’re willing to hit no matter what, it’s important to have flexibility when it comes to which path you’ll take as well as flexibility on the destination itself.
Another feature you’ll notice in these North Stars is that these students will not wake up one day and declare: “I’m done!” Rather, these declarations encourage a process of mastery.
Mastery is not simply becoming an expert at something. It is the process of endless learning, growth, and refinement. A true master is never finished learning.
However, even if you can never call yourself perfect at something, you can still develop comprehensive knowledge and become proficient enough in a skill to call yourself a master.
Hitting a goal is not a matter of arriving, it is a process of becoming.
References & Further Reading
[1] Byrne, S.M., Cooper, Z., & Fairburn, C.G. (2004). Psychological predictors of weight regain in obesity. Behaviour Research and Therapy, 42(11), 1341-1356. https://doi.org/10.1016/j.brat.2003.09.004
Bennett, D. (2009, March 15). Ready, aim ... fail: Why setting goals can backfire. Boston.com. http://archive.boston.com/bostonglobe/ideas/articles/2009/03/15/ready_aim____fail/.
Lisa D. Ordóñez, Maurice E. Schweitzer, Adam D. Galinsky, and Max H. Bazerman, 2009: Goals Gone Wild: The Systematic Side Effects of Overprescribing Goal Setting. AMP, 23, 6–16, https://doi.org/10.5465/amp.2009.37007999
Steve Shapiro, Goal-Free Living (Hoboken, New Jersey: Wiley, 2006).