Why I Don’t Believe in Target Weights

I just finished reading another memoir. This one is written by the blogger Andie Mitchell and is titled It Was Me All Along. Just to give you a background on it, the majority of the memoir talks about Andie’s struggles with finding a balance between food. While a lot of the book focuses around her weight loss (she started off as being an obese child), I didn’t find the book to be triggering at all. She also went through a restrictive/overexercise phase, and the book tells her journey to tame both the restrictor and the binger inside of her. One quote in particular stuck with me:

“I decided in that moment that I would try my best to let myself find the weight I was supposed to be. If not running everyday… meant that I would gain 5 pounds, then I would accept each one of them.”

A lot of people in recovery use exercise as a “crutch”. So many of us in recovery have plastered onto our Instagram accounts: LW___ HW___ GW___. But do we really know what our goal weight is? And once we reach this goal weight, we go back to exercising. And we try as hard as we can to stay exactly at our minimum. Maybe our bodies aren’t meant to stay at that number.

If you are having a hard time because your weight is yo-yoing a few pounds and you feel like you have to watch your intake/exercise frequently just to maintain your weight, then maybe you should rethink what you are doing.

Because in the long run, is spending your life compulsively watching a silly number on the scale going to make you feel fulfilled? Do you want to be sitting on your deathbed feeling proud of the fact that you kept your weight exactly the same? Or would you rather remember the smiles, the memories, the laughs?

Honestly, it’s up to you.