I don't mind questions. Obviously. I blog about my weight loss journey in the hopes that my experiences can help even one person reach their own goals. However, there is one question that I just can't answer.
"What is your GOAL WEIGHT?"
The answer I usually give is, "I don't know". I'll get more detailed with that answer today.
For the longest time I would say that I didn't know, because I was still so far away from any number I would even think about using as a "goal weight". I can remember at one time I even thought that perhaps my goal weight would be as high as 175. I've blogged about the fact that perhaps I would be happy in a comfortable size 12 (or even 14). Well, I've met those goals and I can tell you that I'm not yet at my goal weight.
I still do struggle with wanting to come up with an actual number as my goal weight. I want to believe that I will hit some arbitrary number and all of the sudden I will be perfectly happy with everything about my body. Let's be real. That isn't going to happen. Being happy with how my body looks is not going to happen because of some number. There's a lot more work that needs to be done to get to that point.
When you think about it, it's really not easy to come up with a "final" goal number. I've thought about using things other than the scale to determine my final goal, but that doesn't really work either. I could say that my final goal is to wear a certain size, but given how women's clothing sizes change that isn't a great tool to use. I've blogged about this before, but just the other day I tried on a pair of shorts at Old Navy; they were a size 10 and I couldn't even get them all the way up. I then came home and tried on a pair of my sisters' shorts that she had given me last year. They were also Old Navy brand and they were a size 8....and they fit! So, trying to reach for a certain size won't really tell me anything about whether or not I'm healthy.
Healthy. That's another interesting concept. What's the definition of healthy? Remember the time I blogged about my numbers back in 2012? That was when my cholesterol and blood pressure numbers were pretty much as healthy as any doctor would want. But I weighed over 200 pounds so everyone would assume I was not healthy when they looked at me. So just saying that I want to be healthy doesn't work for me either because, really, what the heck does that mean?
Of course there is always the lovely BMI chart to help determine what a reasonable goal weight might be for someone. I may not completely agree with BMI, but I'm starting to believe that it is not a bad tool to use to figure out what might be a reasonable number to strive for. My issue is not getting hung up on that number. I don't want to get sucked back into that not good enough thinking; that if I don't hit that number it means I haven't succeeded.
OK, so what's my goal then? I stand firm on the I don't know answer. I have been giving myself goals along the way. My first goal was to get below 200. I met that in April 2018. My second goal was to get to 175, which would put me in the overweight category on the BMI chart instead of obese. I hit that goal on May 5th.
The next number I am going to focus on is 150.6. You're probably thinking that's kind of a weird number, but that number would mean I have lost exactly 100 pounds from my absolute highest weight ever recorded. I am not declaring this as my goal weight, however, because I am not sure that will be a place I can maintain. If you remember, I've talked about the fact that I have not gotten down to 150 pounds since I started documenting my weight. In 2002 I got down to about 152 pounds, but I don't think I was at that weight for that long before I started creeping back up into the 160's. And, if you recall from that same numbers post in 2012, I talked about the fact that my doctor at the time said she thought a good weight range for me would be 145-160. I want to get to 150, but maybe when I hit that I'll want to see if I can get down to 145. Or, maybe I decide I don't get to live my life quite the way I want to at 150 so I let myself get closer to 160. I won't know until I get there.
So that's it. My next goal is to hit 150.6 and then I will go from there. The fact of the matter is my journey will never hit an end point anyway. When I hit that number I will have to continue doing what I have been doing in order to stay down there. Sure, I'll be able to have a little more freedom with my food, but not much. So my goal weight doesn't really matter because my life is not going to change much from where it is now and where it has been for the last couple years.
No comments:
Post a Comment