What’s a Good Weight For Me?
Many years ago, my then 8 and 10 year old children were
leafing through some old photo albums.
They came across a picture of someone and asked “who’s that woman?” They were shocked to learn that it was
me. It was me before children, when I
was about 27 years old, certainly an adult but much thinner. That’s when it struck me that my perception
of what I should weigh had been altered.
Maybe it was that everyone else around me was getting older and
heavier. It was when we were in the
midst of ‘super-sizing’ everything. I was working fulltime with two kids....so on and so forth. Shortly thereafter, a close family friend came
to visit. She was about 65 years old at
the time, could have been Sally Fields' twin sister, energetic, active, and slender.
She mentioned to me that she weighed the same as she did on the day she
got married. Why was I surprised by that? She was an adult when she got married. I, on the other hand, was 40 pounds heavier than when I got married.
From the moment we
are born, our metabolism starts slowing down.
Every year after birth, our metabolic needs slow down gradually. A newborn consumes 100
calories/pound/day. If we ate at the same rate then an average 130 pound woman
would consume about 13,000 calories a day.
Clearly our metabolisms as adults are much lower. In fact, if you keep everything the same as
far as activity level and calories consumed, you will gain about a pound or two
every year. Doctors are often reluctant
to bring up weight because they don’t want to be accused of making patients
feel bad. Also it takes time to discuss
issues related to proper diet and exercise.
Often it is easier to just ignore issues. In addition there is something impersonal
about using body mass indices and charts to convince a patient that they are
overweight.
When patients ask me what’s a good weight for them I tell
them to go to their oldest living relative’s house and look at their pictures
from when they were 18. I talk about
myself and how my goal is to weigh what I weigh the day I got married. You don’t need a chart to tell you what’s a
good weight for you, you just need to leaf through a high school yearbook from 1970.
There are a few things that have worked for me in my ongoing struggle to weigh what I weighed when I got married. First adopt a low oil, plant-based, whole grain diet. I lost thirty pounds in one year doing this; 13 pounds just from cutting back on oil in my food and 10 pounds from eliminating dairy. Second, get a standing desk at work. I lost three pounds in a few months doing this. Third, exercise regularly. I didn't lose a lot of weight exercising but doing so gives me the stamina to stand at my desk all day. I march on in my journey to get back to my wedding weight!!
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