How to Set Diet Goals

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There are many reasons that you might wish to alter your diet. Perhaps you are overweight and are concerned about the implications of this on your lifestyle and on your health. Alternatively perhaps you are underweight and are concerned about malnutrition and brittle bones/weak muscle mass. Then there's the possibility that you just want to improve your health by eating more healthily and consuming more fruits and vegetables, or that you want to improve your muscle mass and need to couple an increase in resistance exercises and exertion with a higher consumption of lean protein. There are many reasons that we might want to set and strive for particular diet goals, and a range of different said goals are born out of these needs. The question is, how do you go about setting these targets?

Assess

First of all you need to assess your current situation. This means looking at what you eat right now on a daily basis, so try keeping a food diary for a week or two and write in it honestly everything that you eat (description and calorie count). It can also help you to look at some totals at the end of this week and some averages ? what were your total calories? Average daily calories? And what percentage of these were protein, carbs or fibre?

This helps as it allows you to look at a base rate and find out how far you've come as you start to make steady progress.

Decide What You Want

As mentioned previously, there are many different health goals that you might opt for depending on your current situation. You may wish to lose weight, but you may also wish to gain it, or to just increase your muscle mass. You need to know what it is that you want before you can start making positive changes in that direction.

Once you know what you want, come up with a plan ? increase or decrease the number of calories you eat and the way they are distributed among food groups. You may wish to just eat more protein and less fat, or you might want to reduce your calories across the board. Look online and do your research to find out what kind of changes you need to make to be successful.

Goals

This then allows you to write down your diet goals; to eat '250 fewer calories', to eat '100 fewer fatty calories and 100 fewer carbohydrates' etc. Make sure that your goals are realistic though and something you will be able to do and if you try to gradually decrease the number of calories you eat, rather than immediately eating fewer, you will find them more manageable and you might not even notice. Eat 30 fewer calories a week and you will barely notice any difference each week. However by the end of the year you will be on 1,560 fewer calories ? of course you can go faster than that.

You might alternatively want to set your goals as more concrete changes to your body ? e.g. to 'lose 10lbs' by the end of next year. You should still make sure to look at your current diet though to give you more idea of how to go about this weight loss, and at the same time you should ensure your goals are always concrete rather than abstract. In other words then you should lose 50lbs by next year, or eat 250 fewer calories ? not just generally 'lose weight over the next few years'.

Biofeedback

Biofeedback is the word for any kind of data regarding your body. For instance then a heart rate monitor is a form of biofeedback, as is a set of scales. Likewise looking at your number of calories consumed each week is also a form of feedback. It is important to make regular checks as this way you will be able to monitor your progress and know what you need to change, what's working, and generally how to increase your weight loss, weight gain or weight redistribution.