The initial goal of therapy should be to achieve a 10% reduction in body weight. Patients should be encouraged to lose 1-2 lb/week and thus should be able to achieve 10% reduction within the first 6 months of treatment. Subsequently, efforts should be directed at maintaining the weight loss.

Recent studies suggest that patients often desire to achieve much greater weight losses than this 10% goal [19]. What patients report as a "dream" weight would be accomplished by a 38% reduction in body weight; a weight that would make them happy, would be accomplished by a 31% reduction in weight; a weight that would be "acceptable" would be accomplished by a 25% weight loss, and a weight that they would be disappointed to achieve would be accomplished by a 15.7% weight loss.