Your Best Weight

What's the difference between your best weight and the BMI or "ideal weight"?

Happiness and contentment with your life.  Period.  Done.

For a while, I've had the growing suspicion that weight is killing us because we stress about it so much -- if that's true, it's not the weight that's killing us, it's the stress we put on ourselves doing all that damage.

While that may not capture the whole story, in terms of our eating choices leading diabetes, heart disease, high blood pressure, etc, I think it's a really important point to underscore Yoni Freehoff's idea of  "best weight".  Your best weight is going to be the one that you can live the life you love at. 

If you're able to eat the foods you love, participate in the activities you enjoy, feel comfortable in your own skin  -- that is your best weight.  And that has very little to do with the "ideal" weight a health professional may give you -- or a range on the BMI scale.....don't even get me started on the 600 ways that scale's value has been misrepresented to the public!!! 

Like Yoni says:

 "....  why do we place such a premium on the notion of that perfect, healthy weight? Why isn't "trying our best" enough when it comes to weight loss?

....

We aim to suffer and sacrifice and restrict far beyond what's comfortable, and then try to convince ourselves that somehow results won by under-eating and over-exercising will last—that, "nothing tastes as good as thin feels."

But of course extremes don't last. As a species, we're simply not built to endure unnecessary suffering for the long haul. And yet each year spawns a new crop of books claiming to have found the latest, greatest (and, of course, highly restrictive) route to weight loss.

Well here are two long-term weight management truisms for you.

If you can't happily eat less, you're not going to eat less. And if you can't happily exercise more, you're not going to exercise more.

Next time you're considering a new diet or other weight-loss technique, ask yourself a simple question: "Could I happily continue living this way?" If the answer is no, you're just wasting your time. Ultimately, weight lost through suffering almost always finds its way back. You need to like your life."

If you only take away one thing from this post, let it be Yoni's closing line:

You need to like your life!!!! 

If you don't, what's the point of all this hard work??