Every diet I ever started, started with a weight loss goal… I wasn’t looking for a healthy diet for weight loss.    

Until the last one.  

My last weight loss journey I was terrified to set a weight loss goal for fear of failure.

I lost the first 90 pounds, 5 pounds at a time. 

And I totally focused on non-scale goals that had nothing to do with the horrible device.  ;)  

Don’t get me wrong the scale is an important TOOL for weight loss, but it doesn’t dictate what is healthy and what isn’t

Goals are really important but scale goals only will stop you from reaching your goal weight loss goal…

Creating a healthy diet for weight loss sounds so easy… but when the word diet is included nothing is easy!

So why should you really focus on the “Healthy” portion instead of the “diet” portion of that phrase?  We are going to go through this so hang out and see how this might work for you!

Healthy Diet for Weight Loss:  Focus on the Healthy

When you have 100 pounds or more to lose focusing on the “scale goal” and doing yet another diet feels like a life sucking mess!

This is what causes that horrible roller coaster of weight loss.

We go “ALL IN” changing EVERYTHING… then life happens, and our all in hasn’t become part of who we are yet, so we go completely OFF THE RAILS.

Instead focusing on small non-scale healthy goals, allows us to “become” that person we so want to become.

One of the early things I tracked was eating healthy portions.  Tracking the healthy portion gives us a trackable maintainable goal. It doesn’t depend on eating kale for success.

There are a lot of “things” we can do that are healthy.  We can focus on things like, water consumption, the number of steps we can take, or on healthy sized portions regardless of the food we are consuming.

I know focusing on “healthy” may not sound exciting.  But it kept me consistent and it helped me maintain once I reached my goal.

Healthy Diet for Weight Loss: Focusing on the Number on the Scale Is Overwhelming and Depressing

Every time I focused on the number on the scale, I would get overwhelmed and depressed.  100 pounds to lose feels like a lot of weight.

But and this is important, weighing is important.  Without weighing we don’t know if we are making progress.  

The number on the scale does not define YOU, but it is a marker that is necessary on your weight loss journey.

So this is the part of the weight loss journey where you separate who you are from the number on the scale. 

When we focus on the non-scale goals and only use the number on the scale as a single piece of data that helps us figure out how well our healthy diet for weight loss is working.

Healthy Diet for Weight Loss: How Can You Find Non-scale Goals to Create a Healthy Diet for Weight Loss

The first step to this is ditching your preconceived notion of “diet”.  Let’s look at instead how to make this permanent!

In reality a diet is what you eat and how you fuel your body.  It’s not a short term thing you do to lose a few pounds (or a lot of pounds).

So going into the journey you can look for healthy goals that you can add to your day. Instead of looking for foods to remove from your day

I can’t tell you what your healthy goals will be.  For me I added water and tracked it, and got rid of boxed food for myself and my family. And finally I tracked my portion sizes.

This started off my weight loss journey and as I felt comfortable with these new habits, I added walking.  Then because I totally HATED veggies, I started adding veggies to my meals.

Each of these non-scale goals helped me take my fast food, boxed food loving life and convert it to a healthy diet.

Are you ready to do a conversion?  It’s not as hard as it sounds when you address the mindset issues that have you reaching for food to solve all the problems of life.

More on that later… For now…

Let’s Close This Out…

Non-scale goals give you power in your weight loss journey.  You can build your own definition of a healthy diet for weight loss by defining your version of “healthy”.

You don’t have to live on Kale smoothies and chia seeds to be healthy and lose weight.

So often we jump with both feet into total change, and then wonder why we can’t stay on track.

The secret to staying consistent in your weight loss journey and then maintaining that weight loss is small changes over time that you can live with permanently.

If you want to learn how to create small goals jump into my Free 5 Day Challenge coming up mid February. We spend a week learning how to break our healthy goals into small habits and how to track those goals for permanent weight loss.