The 10% Goal
Posted by erin at March 20, 2003 08:09 PMOne of goals of weight watchers is to lose 10% of your body weight in 12 weeks. It is now the 11th week, and I have lost 20 pounds!
That is quite excellent for me. Right now I’m wearing a shirt that hasn’t fit me for almost a year. The pants I bought while at my fattest may require a belt soon. And my $5 pants are baggy, as opposed to when I bought them – I couldn’t button them up to the top.
I am very happy to be back down to my pre-ISO weight, but also somewhat jaded that I gained 20 pounds just because of a stinking office job.
If you’re bored with this already, you should probably stop reading now, because I’m going to go on about it some more…
Way back in 6th grade, during the first Gulf War, in 1991, I reached my full adult height of 5’6”. According to height/weight charts, a person of that height ought to weigh a minimum of 125 and a max of 155 – but as a depressed 6th grader I immediately weighed 165. Other kids my age didn’t hit 110 until freshman year of high school, but by high school I was at 175. My college weight was about 185.6th grade is when I picked up ridiculously bad eating habits - snacking all the time, snacking compulsively, eating when I was depressed, etc., etc.
As I got older, how I felt about my weight changed. As a sixth grader I felt extremely fat, but when I weighed the most, in the adult world, I felt much better about the way I looked. Granted, I was still pretty unhappy with my weight, especially with doctors telling me I was fat.
I’m usually in pretty good shape. In high school when I ran cross country, I figured that was the thinnest I would ever be, because never again would I want to put enough effort in to run 10 miles in a day. Over the past year I’ve been weight training at a gym, but I still wasn’t losing weight, even if I did gain a lot of nice muscle tone.
I never really lost weight before (except a couple of times, like when I started running, or during one 8th grade diet) and since I was usually in pretty good shape, I just assumed that there was nothing more I could do. I was just going to be stuck not fitting into normal clothes and feeling fat for the rest of my life. But then my mom lost weight... and I thought, maybe this isn't just genetic after all...
Yeah, well, it turns out I wasn’t eating right. Kerry told me this last time he visited and I didn’t believe him, but he was right. I didn’t know how to eat healthy, or even how much I was eating. I was only vaguely aware that I was eating compulsively and didn’t know how to stop.
But thanks to weight watchers, I’ve reformed my eating habits. Sure, it’s a lot of hard work, but I already work really hard at exercising – and counting points is way easier than running 10 miles, or even running 3 miles a day. I still work out, but I don’t have to go nuts if I don’t want to.
Better still, I’m getting more used to the idea that I am not “stuck” weighing a certain amount for the rest of my life. I don’t look fat now, but at 155 I will probably look totally hot! If that sounds vain... so be it. 155 is the maximum an adult my size should weight without being fat. I don’t remember ever weighing that much. I think I must’ve rocketed past that when I was 12.
Will I look freaky when the diet is over? Will 155 be too thin? I don’t think so. My mom is shorter than me, but she’s down to about 145, and that’s still a “large” size. She still looks like my mom and all. At 155 I will probably wear size 11 jeans – still somewhat hard to find at the Gap, but I haven’t been able to fit into size 11 since the last time we attacked Iraq...
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March 21, 2003 04:57 AM, Agnieszka said:
I doubt you'll look freakish and weird if you get to 155.
I am, accorind to your statistics, at the minimum weight for my height (I guess I'm not quite 5'6", so maybe not quite minimum) and desptie this I do not look freakishly thin. I guess I also have very small bones and a light build--but anyway, I imainge that you would indeed look totally hot and being vain is a priviledge of the thin in our fat-obsessed society.
So whatever. Be vain. Being hot and in shape are things that I think it is legitimate to be proud of because they require work.
Congratulations on your progress thus far and good luck.
March 21, 2003 09:50 AM, Erin said:
Thanks AK!
It took me about a decade to get used to the idea that I might be "cute".
Crossing the line between cute and hot is mysterious thing.
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