Moving the goalposts

After writing an email to one of my new buddies yesterday, I realised I should probably update this place with regards to my goals. It’s all very well to say that I want to lose weight, but I need something more concrete than that. I’m a numbers girl. At one stage, all I ever did at work was play with numbers, making up stories based on statistics. Unfortunately I’ve moved away from data analysis now and I’m more in policy work, which means boring contract management for me. But I digress – and you’ll notice I do that a lot.

According to the BMI, I’m obese. Without knowing my exact weight right now (I’m guessing it hasn’t changed much, so we’ll estimate it at 96 kg), my BMI is about 35 or 36. If the BMI had its way, my ideal weight would be somewhere between 50 and 66 kg. Now we all know that the BMI is not an accurate measure of body fat, but for some reason, a lot of people still use it. I’ve got photos of me from before 21 when I was anywhere between 50 and 66 kg. In those photos, I look pretty darn good, although I did seem to have a very pointy chin back then. Nowadays, my chin is no longer as pointy because it’s got all that extra cushioning on it. I think I like it better the way it is.

Mikey prefers the me he’s got now to the me in the pictures, as he thinks I look too thin there. In some pictures I’m inclined to agree, especially the ones when I’m at the lower end of that weight range. Going by the old photos I’ve got, I think I look best at the upper end of the range, when I was in my early twenties. Here comes the problem with using weight as a basis for determining when you’ve reached your own version of perfection – as we go through childhood and then puberty, bone mass increases, with a peak at around the age of 30. Weight, and therefore the BMI doesn’t take into account what the weight is made up of, whether it’s bone, fat, muscle or whatever else you might have in your body, like your lunch. So a person who has continued to have the same general amount of fat and muscle between the age of say, 18 and 30, is going to weigh more over time, simply because their bones become more dense over that period. I’ve borrowed a graph from the MRC Human Nutrition Research website, an “independent, authoritative source of scientific advice and information”, to show what I’m talking about.

Now, back to where I’m talking about my goal weight. If I want to look and feel sort of the same as I did four or five years ago, when I remember being at my happiest, body-wise, I can’t expect to weigh the same as I did then. If I were to weigh the same as I did then, that is 65 kg or less, I’d probably be able to eke out a living by just allowing my relatives to feed me up to make me a normal size again.

So taking all of this into account, I’ve decided to use 70 kg as my goal weight. That will still put me in the overweight category, according to the ol’ BMI, but I think it’s a good weight to aim for. That said, if I get to a point before I hit 70 where everything feels just right, then I’ll stop there, because this goal of 70 is just a number to give me something to compare my current number to. I won’t know what my version of perfection is until I get closer to it, but this is a good stepping stone to that place.