The 3 Biggest Weight Loss Goal Mistakes Women Make (And How to Fix Them)

The Second Week of January Reality Check

Let me say something important: If you're reading this in the second week of January and starting to doubt yourself, you're right on schedule. This is the week most people start questioning everything—not because they're doing anything wrong, but because nobody taught them how change actually works.

Here's what I want you to recalibrate: Setting a goal is simply making a promise to yourself.  When you break it, you erode trust with yourself. 

But when you become a woman who makes a decision and follows through? You become fricking invincible. There's nothing you'll say you're going to do that you don't do.

Can you imagine what your life would be like if you always followed through on yourself?

Today, I'm breaking down the three biggest mistakes women make when setting weight loss goals, and more importantly, how to set goals you can actually achieve.

First Things First: Understand Why You're Overeating

Before we get into the mistakes, we need to address the actual problem. Most people don't understand the root cause of their overeating. They just know that overeating is the problem, and they think that if they could stop, everything would be solved.

But you can't solve a problem you don't understand.

There are multiple reasons people overeat and different types of overeaters. You might be a biochemical overeater, an emotional overeater, or a combination of both. Understanding which type you are is the number one first step to truly stopping overeating.

(By the way, this applies to any "over" behavior—overspending, overworking, overgiving, overwhelming yourself. Just swap out "overeating" for whatever your thing is.)

I have a free quiz that will help you figure this out in under five minutes. It's called "What Type of Overeater Are You?" and you can take it at liapinelli.com/quiz. The quiz will tell you exactly what type of overeater you are and how to approach the problem based on your specific type.

Here's the thing: Most of my readers are highly ambitious, highly successful, high-achieving women who know how to set goals and reach them. They're like, 'Yeah, I can achieve all day with my eyes closed.'

Except when it comes to food and weight.

They can't crack the code because they're overeating for biochemical reasons, emotional reasons, or both—but they don't know which. Until you figure out the reasons, you can't solve the problem effectively. You can set goals all day long, but if you don't understand why you're overeating in the first place, you won't achieve them.

Once you understand your overeater type, you can set goals that actually support your transformation without deprivation or requiring tons of self-control or discipline.

So let's talk about the three biggest goal-setting mistakes that sabotage your success.

Mistake #1: Setting Goals That Require You to Be Miserable

The first mistake I see women making is believing that achieving their goals requires being miserable.

Here's the typical thought pattern: "I need to lose 30 pounds" → "I need to go on a diet" → "Diets mean deprivation." Then you start thinking about all the things you need to stop: stop eating carbs, stop eating fat, stop eating meat, stop, stop, stop, stop, stop.

What you're doing is literally removing pleasure from your life.

And here's the biological reality: We are hardwired to seek pleasure. When you try to remove pleasure, your brain is going to freak out. That's not what we're designed to do. 

So the minute you get a little tired, or a little bored, or a little stressed, or a little overwhelmed, you go into autopilot seeking pleasure. And if you've been depriving yourself, that pleasure is likely to come from a chocolate chip cookie, a donut, or a bag of chips. For me, it's a big bowl of popcorn and a bottle of wine.

This is how we're hardwired.

To avoid the trap of self-deprivation while still achieving your goals, start thinking about your goals as an opportunity to hook yourself up. I want to hook up my future self. I want her to be excited and feel good about what she'll do to achieve my goal. She cannot be dreading it. It cannot be something miserable she has to do for the rest of her life—like eat salad with no dressing forever or never eat a carbohydrate again.

That doesn't work. If it worked, we’d all be at our goal weight right now.

Your goal has to have a strong capital-P Pleasure factor. 

Now, you might be thinking, "How do I do that though, Lia? How do I set a goal that's full of pleasure but also includes weight loss?"

Well, pleasure is individualized. Pleasure is subjective. What feels good to you might not feel good to me, so we have to define that for ourselves. We have to define a way of eating, a way of being, a way of living that allows you to eat foods you love while also living at your happy weight with maximal pleasure and minimal effort.

Here's the nugget I want you to take with you: You must prioritize pleasure if you are going to achieve your goal. I know it sounds like an oxymoron, but it's not.

Mistake #2: Choosing Approaches That Are Totally Unsustainable

The second biggest mistake is signing up for something that's totally unsustainable—meaning time-consuming or mentally taxing.

For those of us running businesses, managing staff, acting as CEOs or directors—for those of us running the show at work and often at home—we do not have the mental capacity to be counting points every day. We don't have the capacity to count calories or worry about adding an hour of exercise to make up for the piece of cheesecake we had at the office party last Tuesday.

We do not have the mental capacity for this.

Whatever goal you're pursuing—whether it's to stop overeating or lose 30 pounds—it has to be time-efficient. 

For example, I will not, nor will I ever, spend my Sunday meal prepping. That sounds like hell to me. I don't like to spend more than 20 minutes in the kitchen at a time. The idea of meal prepping, chopping, and packaging? No, thank you.

And I don't have to. Because I've built a sustainable practice for my weight goals.

I can maintain my happy weight—which, for me, happens to be in the middle of the BMI for a healthy, normal weight for a woman my height—without spending a bunch of time in the kitchen. That's important to me.

If I could only live at this weight by spending hours in the kitchen, never eating in a restaurant, and never having wine? Forget it. It's not sustainable. It's not going to work for me, and it won't work for you if it's not aligned with your values.

You have to set goals that are full of pleasure along the way and sustainable once you achieve them.

Mistake #3: Misunderstanding Quick Wins and Giving Up Too Soon

The last mistake has two parts, both revolving around how quickly wins show up.

Quick wins help keep hope alive early on. When you first start a weight-loss path, losing a few pounds right away helps you think, "Okay, this is working." But here's the thing: If you love what you're doing—if there's pleasure involved, it's not time-consuming, and it's sustainable—you'll keep going even without immediate results. Why? Because it's not "hard." It's full of pleasure.

Most of my clients start losing weight right away, but some don't. Some are like, "Huh, the scale hasn't budged." And that's okay because some bodies are slower. But they don't have to sacrifice or deprive themselves. They're like, "Well, I might not be losing weight yet, but I really like these changes. I'm feeling good. This feels sustainable."

That's the formula: Pleasure plus sustainability keeps you moving toward your goal.

The flip side? For some people, weight loss is slow. When it's slow, you think, "This isn't working," and decide to go back to eating how you were before. But here's what you didn't understand: Your body was actually in the process of losing weight. It just wasn't showing up on the scale yet. You could be one day away from seeing results, but because you got a case of the "forget-its," you ate the pizza, the Coca-Cola, the ice cream, and all the things.

You were three feet from gold, and you walked away right before you were about to see that shift.

Why Community Is the Game Changer

This is where having support changes everything. When you think it's time to throw in the towel, having a coach to say, "No girl, not yet"—that's my role for my clients. I've seen women lose weight quickly and lose weight slowly in my program.

When it's sustainable and pleasurable and you have somebody in your corner—the support of a community, mentor, or coach—it actually can be fun. It actually can feel good.

Yes, weight loss can be fun. It can feel good. It can take you into a fuller expression of yourself and of who you were meant to be in this world. I know that sounds crazy, but that's what happened for me, and it's what I see happening over and over with my clients.

There's a great book, Atomic Habits by James Clear, that goes into detail about how to maintain and sustain habits you want to incorporate into your life. 

The formula is simple: Pleasure + Sustainability + Support = Success.

Your Three-Step Action Plan

Here's what I really hope you take away from this:

Step 1: Understand the type of overeater you are. Take my free quiz at liapinelli.com/quiz—it takes under five minutes and tells you whether you're a biochemical overeater, an emotional overeater, or a combination of both.

Step 2: Set goals that work. Your goals need to be rooted in the type of overeater you are, but they also have to be pleasurable and sustainable. If you're not somebody who likes to eat salad with no dressing, your plan can't be eating salad with no dressing. It's never going to work long-term.

Step 3: Get support. You need community. You need that coach or mentor who will lift you up when you think it's time to quit—when you might just be three feet from gold.

If you want to learn more about how pleasure and sustainability come together in a practical way, check out The Aligned Method at liapinelli.com. This is where we define what pleasure means for you specifically and create a sustainable path to your happy weight.

Weight loss can be fun. It can feel good. And it can transform you into a fuller expression of who you're meant to be.

Now go take that quiz and let's get you on the path to actual, sustainable results.