The Lies & Myth of Goal Weight

YES!  I really wish people would throw the BS BMI chart out and look at body fat percenatge if they must use a number to measure success by!  At least that take muscle and bone mass into consideration.  I have a friend who is clearly overweight (her body fat % the last time was mid 30's)... but because she is very petite boned and has almost no muscle mass, she is still a very normal BMI (whereas I spend more days than not in the "overweight" BMI range, even though my body fat % is a very healthy 25 (for a 50 year old woman), because I have big boobs, muscular thighs, and heavy lower body bones).

It breaks my heart to see friends and clients lose huge amounts of weight but then become depressed and feel like "failures" because they couldn't hit some completely arbitrary number that they pulled out of thin air (or out of their High School weight chart).

Sure, I would LOVE to be 125 pounds (which is in the lower range of "normal" BMI for my height), but no matetr how much I want it, it is simply not possible with the body God gave me, even I had no fat at all (which isn't healthy as you get older, anyway), and if I had set that number (which I completely pulled out of my rear end because it sounded tiny) as my goal weight, I would have felt like a failure instead of celebrating 5 years of success at only a few pounds over my very realistic goal weight!

Set a realistic goal weight.  If you exceed it, than that is icing on the cake.  If you did NOT seta  realistic goal weight and are feeling like a failure because you were not able to achieve that little piece of Nirvana, let it go. Reality is your friend (and it will keep you from having to torture yourself with severely restricted calories or extreme amounts of exercise and allow you to embrace a healthy balanced lifestyle with room for fun and even some food treats).

Lora

Thanks for posting this.