Goal weights

iamMLH

I warn you now, this is going to be a rant:

I cringe almost every time I hear someone talk about their goal weight or how much weight they want to lose. Every time I read that, I imagine someone talking to their doctor about the best way to loose weight and the doctor suggesting amputation. It's preposterous. Our goals are so much deeper than the weight that we lose.

Don't get me wrong, losing weight isn't necessarily a bad thing, but we are lying to ourselves and others when we talk in terms of our goal weight. For everyone who has a goal weight, I sincerely encourage you to reconsider the way you think about what you want. You might be quite disappointed to find how empty the prize at the end can be.

Losing "weight" means almost nothing and motivates almost no one, despite what so many people say. If you could lose weight, but feel worse, look worse and be less healthy, would you want to? I'm assuming the answer is universally, "no." What if you could lose weight and everything else in your life would stay the same? You wouldn't look any different or feel any different. You're health wouldn't improve, and your life wouldn't be any better. Would you do it if you had to restrict sources of joy and rearrange your entire life? Probably not.

Yet this is how many people set their goals, and with a lot of the fad diets and pills on the market, these risks are the realities they face. They watch the scale hoping that with every lower number they are approaching their mark. However, when they get to their magic goal, they don't look the way they hoped they would look. They don't feel the way they hoped they would feel. Most importantly (for many of them) they don't have the confidence they had hoped they would have.

For most of us, our real goals are looking better, feeling better, living pain-free, being healthy and being able to do things we never could. Yet we reduce these to an arbitrary number that measures none of those things. It's a mile marker on the road , but it should never be our destination. It's time to change the conversation from losing weight to, at the very least, losing fat. More importantly than that, what would the conversation sound like if we all stopped worrying about "losing weight" and started talking about the things we wanted to gain?