Hard to know when to stop losing!

AnnPT77

I reset my goal weight a couple of times. I knew that my first goal (130) was just picked out of the air, and planned/expected to re-evaluate it. When I got there, I decided to go for another 5, to 125. Somehow, I felt vaguely like I "wasn't there yet", despite the fact that my upper body was looking kind of skinny in spots (I'm muscular-ish, especially arms/shoulders. The muscles really show, even when zero pumped. Looks weird on a l'il ol' lady.)

At that point, I figured out some specific additional objectives that were behind that vague feeling. The easiest to explain is that I still had some loose, squishy fat on my abdomen that I perceived was kind of weighting down the loose skin there, making the loose skin (per my guess) less likely to shrink back, even if it was willing (given my age, etc.).

By this point, I had already started slowly adding calories back to my daily goal, not trying to get to maintenance right away, but to make the loss really, really slow. I also increased my weight training and level of core exercises, and made it a point to get plenty of protein (I'm a vegetarian, so I need to work at it sometimes).

Then, one morning I woke up, put my hand on my stomach there in bed and said "huh. Maybe I'm 'there'." based on the way it felt. I got up, looked at myself in the mirror, poked my stomach a little, and started working more explicitly on adding calories back to get to a maintenance level. That's where I am now, homing in on maintenance. (I think this realization came at around 122, I don't really remember.)

P.S. In case 122 sounds a little light for 5'5" - there are frame & body configuration reasons. Many people my height will be better with more weight.

TL;DR: Once you're close enough to "the right weight" to be confused about exactly what the right weight is, consider trying to identify some non-scale specific(-ish) criteria to use in deciding.

feisty_bucket

Using bodyfat % as a metric and target is the solution to this problem.