In my opinion, and in my experience, it's a mistake to aim for short-term goals such as losing X pounds. Indeed, I think it's a mistake to even measure your wei

In my opinion, and in my experience, it's a mistake to aim for short-term goals such as losing X pounds. Indeed, I think it's a mistake to even measure your weight, because weight measures good muscle too. Once you "accomplish" your short-term goal, after intense short-term effort, the natural tendency is to begin to slack off, and the fat comes back. The key is to make permanent, maintainable lifestyle changes to become healthier, including diet and exercise — cut down on sodium and added sugars too — and eventually your body will look and feel better. The fat will come off and stay off, but you don't need to measure to tell that, you can just see the changes in your body. The thing about exercise is, the more exercise you do, the more exercise you're capable of doing in the future. Sedentary people aren't capable of exercising with the intensity to burn off a ton of calories, whereas athletes burn off so many calories that they have to eat a ton just to compensate. Short-term, exercise may not do a lot of good, but long-term, it adds up. You have to "invest" in exercise, and the payoff will come, slowly but surely. Admittedly, there's one downside to this gradual approach, which is that you may have to keep buying new clothes that fit right, until you eventually stabilize.