Millions of Americans resolve to lose weight each year.  Many fail.

Clinical psychologist Mark Crawford of clinical consulting firm Lyles & Crawford suggests that failure to set concrete goals is at the heart of a high percentage of these failures.  Crawford offers four tips for reaching your weight loss goals:

1. Set a specific goal
2. Set a realistic goal
3. Develop a plan for reaching your goal
4. Establish a time frame for achieving your goal

Like many of you, I established a weight loss goal for 2011, or more accurately, for the first 4 months of the year.  I’d like to lose 13 pounds by the end of April.

Why 13 pounds?  I joined my company in late 2003, and have gained – you guessed it – 13 pounds in the ensuing 7+ years.  On my frame, that’s significant.

That’s why I’ve joined 9 colleagues in a Live Healthy America challenge.  LHA is a 100 day Wellness Challenge which encourages Americans to embrace healthier lifestyles.  Click on the link if you’d like to learn more about it.

In the course of getting our team going and developing goals, someone mentioned LoseIt.com to me.  I’ve been utilizing the site for the last few days, and have found it to be of significant help in working toward my goal.

You can create a FREE account at LoseIt.com in a matter of seconds.  Once you’ve done that, you enter some basic information:  age, height, sex, current weight, target weight, and a date by which you’d like to achieve your target weight.  The site calculates a daily maximum number of calories you can consume in order to reach your target.  Then, you simply log on and identify what you’ve eaten for each meal; LoseIt calculates how many calories you have in the bank for the remainder of the day.  In this case, I’ve had 3 main meals (you can’t see Dinner in this screenshot), and am 326 calories under my daily “budget” (please click on any of the following images for a clearer, close-up view)–

If I then exercise, I burn calories and in so doing, end up further under my daily allotment (note the -191 calories under “Exercise”)–

Handy analytics are built into LoseIt.Com; you can analyze your food intake by meal, for instance:

…and can also track your caloric intake day by day, as the week unfolds:

Adding the foods you’ve consumed is easy.  Drop down menus include home cooked items as well as menu items at popular restaurants:

And if you can’t find an item, you can add your own, using a site like NutritionData to identify the nutritional data for it:

At the heart of the program, and only a glance away at any point when you’re on the site, is a weight loss monitor:

If you’ve embarked upon a weight loss or weight management program, I’d definitely encourage you to check out LoseIt.com I’ve found the site very helpful thus far.   I’ll post an update when I get closer to the target date for the completion of this weight loss program.  Good luck!

Aww, Tiger.  Watching Mr. Woods during the 2nd round at Quail Hollow was bewildering and more than a little disappointing.  The guy who’s the ultimate grinder, a fierce competitor, so tough mentally – a guy who won the U.S. Open on a broken leg – essentially gave up and was merely going through the motions.  Perhaps one could argue that his neck was bothering him, but when was the last time anyone saw Tiger Woods three putt from three feet? …and not care?? He phoned it in.

There’s nothing in life of significance that worth’s doing at all if you aren’t going to throw yourself into it and give it your best.

Who cares?  You do.  You may have a boss, you may receive an annual review, you have a wife or husband or kids who rely upon you, but in the final analysis your most important judge is you.  And that’s someone you can’t fool.

Life’s too short to phone it in.

What more is a brand than a promise?

Just as we expect Apple to deliver wonderfully imagined & designed devices, Porsche to deliver German precision and a thrilling driving experience, and Zappos to provide extraordinary service…  your personal brand represents a promise to your customers.

What does your brand promise?

Is it clever thinking and ingenuity?  Reliable, dependable support?  Negativity and a crappy attitude?  Stunningly effective project management?  Mere adequacy?   Nothing memorable?  Organization-changing leadership?  Promising too much and delivering too little?

What is astonishing is how people can agonize so much over which brand of car they drive, shoes they wear or coffee they consume – yet be so utterly careless with their personal brand.

Ask yourself: what does my brand represent?  What am I doing today to enhance my brand – and the promise it offers my customers?

Are you sometimes crippled by fear? Afraid to try new things, tackle new challenges or meet new people?  I imagine that’s true of almost all of us at some time.

I recently discovered a marvelous post on this subject by J.D. Roth of Get Rich Slowly. Although GRS is essentially a personal finance blog, this post is relevant to just about anyone as it offers up a simple way to transform our lives.

Check out this thought provoking, well written post here:  The Power of Yes:  A Simple Way to Get More Out of Life

How well would you perform if faced with an emergency or disaster like the ditching of the U.S. Airways flight in the Hudson River yesterday?  You can check your “Disaster IQ” in an interactive feature at The New York Times.

To learn more about behavior during disasters and how to improve your odds in a disaster, check out Tara Parker-Pope’s related article, “Learning to be your own best defense during a disaster.”