If you have a fair amount of weight to lose then it is realistic to lose 10 pounds in 10 days. The first thing that is paramount in any diet is to set goals, and thus this weight loss of 10 pounds can be your first milestone.

Most successful people find that setting goals is one of the most important parts of achieving their short and long term aims, 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 that 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.

Your first short term goal may be to lose 10 pounds in 10 days but over the longer period you also need to set a weight figure of where you ultimately want to get down to, and to make your goal achievable you need to look at it over an extended period of time.

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.

By setting a goal you can lose 10 pounds in 10 days but you also need to make sure that once this is achieved you have the next goal ready to progress to, in this way the loss won't be short lived and you will ultimately get to your desired weight.