Were you EVER that thin?

I think a lot of it is just our perception, of what we think is normal. I am almost 50, and when I was a teen back in the 70s, the general consensus of what was a normal healthy weight was quite lower than it is now. At 5'6", at 125 I felt fat by comparison to the other friends and girls around me that were built differently. My best friend at the time was 5'8" and barely 98 pounds. She ate like a pig. She was just built differently than I was, and had a different metabolism. If a girl my age weighed 150 or more, she was definitely considered 'fat'. Now, it is not uncommon to see 14-15 year olds well over 200 pounds.

My weight went up and down a bit after HS, but at 25, after having my first child, I lost down to 136 and felt healthy. I was not skinny by any means, but I wasn't overweight either. Over the next 20 yrs my weight creeped up to my highest of 237. 100 pounds over my lowest weight. My outside definitely didn't match my inside. Mentally I was never an obese woman. In my brain, I just needed to lose a few pounds. One thing that helped keep me in this denial, was that those around me were this weight as well. Society had relaxed its standard of 'normal' weight so much.
When I was growing up, women who weighted 250 pounds were an anomaly. There were very few of them around, and you didn't see them very much out in public. They stayed inside and ordered clothes from the mail order catalog, or sewed them themselves, because you couldn't walk into the nearest Walmart and buy a size 20 pair of pants.
I don't condone 'fat shaming' in any way, but I do think that we have become TOO accepting and enabling of morbid obesity, and it is killing our population.
It has been almost 25 yrs since I have been under 140. And I had just about given up hope of ever being at a healthy weight again. But I have lost almost 50 pounds, and with every pound I lose, I see that healthy, lean person inside me emerge more and more. Fortunately I never lost the vision of what she looked like at a healthy weight, and that gives me motivation to be healthy again.

I often wonder tho, for those who have always been severely overweight, how do they envision themselves at a healthy weight, if they have never seen it. How difficult is it to accomplish a goal that you have never seen? I would guess that you would just have to mentally create that person in your mind, and strive to make it a reality.

I think it depends. You don't say how tall that woman was, and we don't know what her shape or body composition was like. If you have a large amount of lean mass then 115 lbs may be too light for your body. It might be just right for hers.

However, a lot of this is about your mindset. I think you aiming for 150 lbs - well it's fine. It would be slightly overweight, but again, that depends a bit on your body composition. I think that by saying that anything less than that is unrealistic for you, is a little unrealistic. I don't think it matters in the long run, because you can aim for 150, and re-evaluate when you get there. I hear a lot of women saying things like that - "oh I could never be below x lbs, and I would look sick/anorexic if I was". I think a lot of them are wrong, and just don't believe in their ability to lose that much.

As for me, I am 5'3" and I was 214 lbs. I have always been overweight - most of my adult life I have been obese. When I was 18 I was probably more than 180 lbs, so I have never had a particular "I looked good at this weight" goal to aim for. I set 129 lbs as my goal, based on BMI, my estimated body fat percentage, and what I estimated my dress size would be at that weight (for which I was spot on.) I got there, and have been maintaining for a few months. I could lose some more, and I probably will do once I've got my head around the whole maintainence thing. I could never imagine being this thin (and I'm by no means "skinny") but now I'm here, I know that I am able to lose more if I put my mind to it.

Set your goal wherever you feel comfortable, but don't put unnecessary limitations on yourself. Part of this is about losing that "I'm the fat one, I'll never be that "skinny" girl". That may take some time. You may be happy & healthy at 150lbs. You may get there and decide that you want to - and can - lose more. Believe in yourself. :flowerforyou:

This is a fantastic post. Congrats on your success, and showing that it certainly can be done. It IS so much of a mind game. You really have to get your head straight to get your body in line.

So many great stories and responses! They are wonderful to hear and have given me a great boost of confidence. Thanks so much!!

Like others have said, 115# might not be realistic.
But definitely start with your pre-preggo weight and then go from there.
So like 185 > 170 > 160, etc.

I weighed 128# in high school and I'm sure it didn't look so good on me at 5'7" due to the way I'm built.
In my profile pic, I'm about 143#.
130# was my goal when I started but I don't think it's realistic anymore - 140# is though lol.

I'm glad we all helped =]

In 2001 i had lost quite a bit of weight through diet and excessive exercise....my lowest was 165 and was a size 12 and i looked like i was very sick....my mother had seen a photo of me as she lived quite far away and she said i looked too skinny....i am a 16-18, and i would be thrilled to get to 190 or so. I have an 8" diameter wrist, not fat on there....i am "large framed"...

i think we all have a number in our heads of where we "think" we would like to be, but we need to be realistic. The one thing that sticks with me is that when i was 40lbs less...i was not hapier than i am now...the ony perk was that i had a newer smaller wardrobe, but still very low self esteem. I need to learn to love myself.....i was always very heavy as a kid....started getting smaller in junior high school......

I am 5'4". I see these stories of people my size weighing 117 or whatever and it will never be me. I would be unhealthy at that weight. I weighed about 215 at the end of my last pregnancy. I weigh about 140 right now. I wear a size 4/6. My goal weight is 135. I am not sure how realistic that is. I am not really liking how boney my hands and feet are getting and how much my hip bones are sticking out. I plan on continuing with strengthening and toning and seeing what happens. When I went to the doctor recently and stepped on the scale, the nurse set the scale to 100 to weigh me (obviously thinking I was somewhere less than 120), I laughed and said she needed to take it up a couple notches. She looked at me oddly and shook her head when she did get my weight right.

All of that to say this, focus on getting healthy. Fat loss is a part of that. Muscle strengthening is a part of that. Endurance and energy are parts of that. The scale and comparing yourself to others shouldn't be your top goals. The can be bench marks, but use them carefully. My profile pic is from yesterday. I have 7 children and weigh less than what I did in 9th grade. Hard work can make a lot happen, but set reasonable goals.

I'm not under 150 but I'm 156 right now and still losing. I have ALWAYS been overweight since elementary school. I remember going on a diet when I was 13 and being happy to weight 161, that was my lowest weight I can remember and now I'm 156!! I started off my diet a year and a half ago at 223, you can do it, slower is better because you need time to learn that is a LIFESTYLE

I am also 5'4" and at one time I weighed 215. Right now I'm 179. One of my first goals is to get to 165. That would be the thinnest I've been in quite some time. I would guess about 8 years. I know I will keep going once I reach that. It's simply a milestone and a number that has some significance to me. After that I would like to get to 150, which is how much I weighed when I got married and probably would be a size 10 for me. At that point I will reconsider my goals. 140 would be fantastic for me, but I'll cross that bridge when I come to it. I haven't weighed 140 in about 18 years and I haven't weighed 150 in 16 years. Wow, that makes me feel old.

Anyway, as you can guess I was never thin either. I guess you could also say I was never active. I don't exactly know what will happen once I get to 150. I know I can get there (it's only 29 lbs away) but after that it gets hazy. I guess I can only say I have those two very realistic and doable goals right now and I will reassess when I reach the second one.

So here is my question ... for those of you who, at one point in time, weighed more than 200 pounds and NOW weigh under 140 pounds ... were you that thin at any point in your life?

I was delivered weighing 180 pounds. I have a link to an issue in Time magazine somewhere that talks about this. It was a C-section birth of course. I don't think I've ever at one point in time been under that amount. It just keeps going up. I'm over 200 now.

I'm not under 140 now, and I don't expect to ever get there, but in HS I was about 135 but not nearly as strong or active as I am now.

But, like Lorina, I currently fit in the same size clothes I wore when I was 15-20lbs lighter. So who cares what the scale says I weigh?