With the new year in full swing it is easy to set HUGE goals, but doesn’t it feel better to actually attain your set goals?

Clients ask me all the time how long will it take me to lose 20 pounds? Well, the question is, how long did it take you to add on those extra 20 pounds?

This gets the ball rolling a direction that makes sense for both parties. If the answer is 5 years or just a year set out with your expectations to be at least half of the time it took you to get there. Through healthy lifestyle, workout, eating, sleeping and stress reduction.

Let’s set out to lose an attainable number such as 2 pounds a week for an obese client and 1 pound a week for an overweight client. We want to focus on body composition (lean mass to fat mass).

Body fat % is a great gauge to help get clients off the scale number and focused on lean mass to fat mass. A healthy athletic Male should be 7-12% body fat and a healthy athletic Female should be 18-23% body fat. This can be a great tool to use in showing the sliding scale of why the scale may not be budging but the hard work is truly paying off.

For example, a woman who is 5’2″ weighing 130 pounds with 30% will look heavy, bloated and more supple in shape. Whereas a woman who is 5’2″ weighing 130 pounds with 18% body fat will look like a body that is lean, athletic and sculpted.

We need to set realistic goals in this time of the year! So keep all of this in mind when you want to “lose weight” or do you want to really trim up and lose body fat and add lean muscle? Just another way to look at the same picture but in a different light!