Most successful people find that setting goals is one of the most important parts of achieving those goals and this applies to almost everything in life including your ability to be successful with weight loss. What you do have to realize however is these goals need to be realistic and you need to believe that you can achieve them or you will be starting off on the wrong foot and failure will be imminent. To make your goal achievable you need to look at it over an extended period of time rather than believing that you can lose 15 pounds in a couple of weeks. While this might be possible it is certainly a lot harder to achieve than to expect to lose that weight over the course of several months. Keeping a diary helps a lot of people to achieve their goals as it helps to enforce the actions that are required to meet those goals on a daily basis. In your diary you can record your body weight, the foods you've been eating, any supplements you have been taking and the results that you have been getting from these actions. This helps you to readjust your goals and make changes to your fitness and nutrition as things change in the course of your weight loss program. Within your major goal you should also have short-term goals and once again these need to be realistic to keep you motivated. These short-term goals will change from time to time as during the course of your weight loss program you will probably find that progress accelerates after certain stages of your plan. Sometimes you will also plateau for a while where your weight loss will tend to slow down and by having a diary you will be able to look at those areas that you might be able to change to get over that plateau and continue to progress.