Did you surpass your weight loss goal?
 

It's exciting to see there are people who achieved their goal weight and then continued to lose. I'm really curious as to the reason(s) why.

As examples:
As you got closer to goal, did you realize you miscalculated "way back when" and it turns out it wasn't going to be low enough?
Did you become attracted to the idea of getting smaller and stay in premaintenance purposefully to see what your "best self" might be?
Did your body just keep losing despite your attempt at maintenance and you decided to let the process lead you where it wanted?

Other reasons?

I'm just curious. Surpassing a goal is such an amazing thing to celebrate! :)

I set my original goal at 150 lbs, as that was my typical low-point during 35 years of yo-yo dieting. When I turned 50 I decided I would be happy at a weight I could achieve and maintain rather than alternate between starving (to try to get to an ideal weight of 130-135) and binging for the rest of my life. 150 was also chosen because it is below "overweight" for my height. Once I got to 150, I continued to tweak based on things I read on this site and recommended books, articles and links. Things like more fat, lower protein, no wheat, no grains, no legumes, no dairy. It was these tweaks that made the last 15 lbs fall off effortlessly (after 35 years of extreme effort and hunger on other diets, this was a revelation). I think those last 15 lbs were inflammation, not fat. To maintain I still have to limit myself to the foods that work for me, but occasionally indulge in off-plan foods on special occasions. I just get back to my LCHF plan with no inflammatory foods and let any gained water & fat come off on its own - I do not under-eat to the point of getting hungry, as hunger was what caused all previous diets to fail. Actually it is not my weight that makes me live like I am in premaintance, it is the other health improvements - no asthma, sinusitis, joint pain, brain fog, exhaustion, etc. that keep me on track.

For me my 210 pound "goal weight" was just a number I had to come up with because this forum required it. So I looked up my height and gender on the BMI chart - picking the first round number that fell below the "obese" category. At 210 I am overweight - not obese. When I chose 210 I had little confidence that I would ever get there. I had been in the 300 to 400+ range for two decades and the lowest I'd ever attained in my yo-yo dieting was 285 (briefly way back in 1999). So 210 was never going to happen. But it was a nice fantasy.

It took me 27 months, but I did eventually reach that goal. Most every time I'd tried to diet over the past 30 years it was a low carb diet. That's what I did this time, too. So what was different? I finally realized that this needed to be a permanent change. My old concept of temporarily "going on a diet" was all wrong and was never going to work for me. Making this "how I eat" for the rest of my life is certainly not what I thought a diet was. I also thought that cheating, "rewards", days off, etc. were part of dieting. As it turned out for me, those are the essential ingredients for diet failure. That behavior just kept me hooked on my old WOE. When I stuck to low carb food I eventually broke free from those addictive carbs. Feelings of deprivation faded. The "diet" became my new WOE. It got easy. I could sustain this. After that reaching my goal weight of 210 pounds was almost inevitable.

My max BMI in the 'normal' category is around 180 pounds, so I certainly have more weight that I could lose. Reaching goal was anticlimactic, to some degree. I wasn't going to change how I eat. I had added a few new foods to my diet those last few months - but not too many. Junky carbs stayed off of my plate. My eating after reaching goal was pretty much the same as before. I sailed right past goal. The weight loss eventually ground to a halt and this is just where I landed. I would like to lose a few more pounds. If I work at tightening up the "diet" within my WOE I'm sure I can lose more. I must continue to eat healthy food. I have no intentions of ever going back to eating junk. If I stick with what got me here I should be able to stay below the "obese" category forever. That's the hope, anyway. So I keep 210 pounds as my goal weight. It is the line I must never cross again. Anything below that and I will consider myself successfully maintaining.

I chose 150 knowing I wanted to go lower, but I like to do things incrementally so the journey doesn't seem so long. Then I bumped it to 140 and now I'm thinking anywhere between 135 - 140 is goal for me. Goal weight includes a number of variables including height, BMI, build (small, medium or big boned) and age. And weight loss is a bit of an organic process ... we learn about our bodies as we go ...

Even within the same healthy range for two people, there's room for movement, to accommodate our own personal taste. Some people prefer the willowy lean look and others like curves. How boring if we all wanted to be the same.

Surpassing goal is not as amazing as staying OP each and every day. I love Ken's comment about reaching goal being anticlimactic since we don't change how we eat. Staying OP ... that's the real celebration :) :)

I started out simply wanting to lose 10 lbs so I could fit into a dress I had!
The weight came off so easily that I kept adjusting my goal. This was based on pure vanity. I decided I wanted to look lean and willowy. I picked 125 because that is what I weighed throughout most of my teenaged years, so I figured it was a natural ideal weight for my body type.
Once I hit 125, I didn't like that my normal daily fluctuations were above that number (125-129), so I purposefully dropped down to 120. Now my highest number is 125 and I usually hover around 123. Again, I feel this is vanity guiding me, but so what?

My body is better looking than it's been since I had kids in my twenties, and I feel better than since my late thirties when arthritis started to settle in. I'm 58.

I weigh daily and am pleased daily - it is a great motivator to stay on plan. I will not let go of this accomplishment for anything.

My goal for most of my adult life was 165. By the time I joined this board, I knew I was going to reach 165, and it would not be enough. Once I got to 155, I had a brief dip below that, but then happily stayed around 155 for many months. Being diabetic means no carb increase or change in the basic diet for me.

I ended up below goal by tweaking things for cholesterol reasons (dropping spenda & aspartame, adding more fiber), and those changes dropped me firmly into the 149-150 range without specifically trying to lose weight. Ideally, I think I would look better closer to 140 as I have areas I would like to lose. We'll see if I ever muster the enthusiasm to take off the last 10lbs.

I really enjoyed reading this :)

Thanks for sharing your stories!

Reading all of your goals & stories was an inspiration!

Congratzzz to you all & I hope you continue on your LC WOE/WOL!

I didn't set any goals in the beginning as I first had to be convinced that LCHF would actually work for me. That took a couple of months, then I set my first goal of reaching 100kg/220lb by October 2016, which for me would represent 12 months of LCHF.

By the time I joined this forum in March it was already clear I was going to surpass that goal, so when I registered here I set my goal to 87kg/191lb, which would represent 45kg/100lb lost on LCHF.

Over the following months it seemed that I would surpass even that, so I revised it down again to 82kg/180lb. I wouldn't make that number within 12 months as things have slowed down more recently, but that's still my current end goal, for however long it takes.

Love this thread.
I went a little lower because I had more energy and less appetite.

I've gone lower than my original goal, not intentionally. It's just what happened and now I maintain with a bit of up and down. I figure I am now at where I'm supposed to be.

Jean

My goal is not a number, but a state of health. I want to be healthy and mobile, pain free and flexible.

Another reason for my not setting a number goal is my own personal weakness of thinking that if I'm on a diet, when it's over I can dive into a vat of chocolate. Slurp!

I've been using LCHF since 1972 for weight control, but it has taken me this long to finally get it through my head that the answer is consistency and that there are certain foods which I cannot eat. EVER.

Recently, while trying to solve an allergic dermatitis mystery, I gave up all dairy and for the first time in a year the scale went down. Maybe it's the inflammation going away. So I learned another lesson: What I crave is what my body is addicted to.

As for the chocolate, I now make my own LC dark chocolate candies and, unlike the sugared kind, it's a simple matter for me to have just a bite and then stop. Stop at a bite? That's not like the old me at all. And I eat it rarely.

So technically I haven't lost to below goal, but my success is encouraging and enough to keep me on this road.

I reduced my goal after I fell below 150 lb. I was 140 lb as a teenager and now I weigh about 127/128. There is a case for weighing LESS at 50+ than you did as a teenager because you lose muscle mass and your body is less dense. I am actually a bit thin....

I should add that it took from Dec 2012 to present to lose the weight. When I think about how heavy I was, I am amazed.

I didn't surpass my goal, but I set it fairly aggressively to a weight I've only ever been as an adult for a very short time (64 kg for 1.67 m). I've managed to stabilise about 5 kg (about 12 lb) above that weight and one dress size higher than I'd like to be (US 10 rather than 8, UK 14 rather than 12, European 40-42 rather than 38-40), but it's not that big a deal so long as I can keep from regaining.
I haven't entirely given up hope of losing those pounds one day. :-)