Paula,
Happy birthday! Thanks for sharing. I have definitely had to modify some of my time-based weight loss goals as well. Working towards a specific goal by a particular time can be motivating for me, but it can also be really discouraging when things come up that set me back so that I won’t hit my goal in the originally planned time-frame.
For me, it seems that most of the times when I set a “lose X amount by X date” goal, they end up backfiring. When I don’t meet that goal, I end up feeling like a failure even when I actually succeeded at making a lot of progress towards my long term goals. I’m trying to move away from those kinds of goals toward more open-ended ones (fit into this or that pair of jeans, lose 10 lbs, lose 15 lbs, lose 20 lbs., etc.,). When I do that, I get to focus more on what I’ve accomplished instead of what I haven’t accomplished.
