What Colour Is The Sky In Your World?

Yesterday I came across a website that was a food tracking with community discussion groups that I hadn’t seen before.  I decided to sign up to check it out.  As I’m filling in the data, they ask my gender and height and current weight and then asked me to put in my goal weight.  Their suggested range for a goal weight was 133-141.  Choke, cough, spew!  What colour is the sky in your world, I wondered.  Not in my wildest dreams do I ever expect to see 133-141 in my lifetime.  I’m 5′7″, 166 pounds on the scale this morning and I feel pretty fit, healthy & good.  I’d love to lose another 16 pounds, my ultimate goal is to weigh 150, but I consider those kind of vanity pounds. 

Now, my sister is the same height as me, with the same basic body shape and frame size as me and she’d consider that goal range of 133-141 to be perfectly acceptable. 

Why do we live in different goal weight worlds?

At my highest, I was 340 pounds.   I wouldn’t want to guess at my sister’s highest weight on the internet like this, but let me say that other than her two pregnancies, the woman has never bought a piece of clothing as big as a size 12.  She’s always been slender.  As her 40s approached and arrived, she’s struggled a bit and wants to shed a few pounds, but at her heaviest, she’s far slimmer than I ever have been.  I think this is the difference.  Perspective.  For me, weighing 166  is *thin*.  Very thin.  Compared to weighing 340 lbs, this is a dream come true.   For my sister, if she ever got up to 166, it would be the heaviest and fattest she’d ever been. 

I wonder if age doesn’t play a part in that, too.  I lost weight when I was 18/19 years old.  I was always a heavier child and teen and by then, I was up to 215 pounds.  I went on a diet at 18 and lost 80 pounds, getting to 135 pounds, right within that goal range.  It seemed like a good weight at the time.  Actually, at the time, I still was heavier than most of my friends. 

Like how to lose weight, what tools work for us and which don’t, I think figuring out where we want to end up is a very personal and individual goal. 

I have to admit though, that these differences make it hard for me to relate to those with less visible of a weight issue than I’ve had in the past.  I recently read Losing It by Valerie Bertinelli. I was surprised at how affected she was by her weight and how badly she felt about it when she had a body that I would have given anything for when I was 340 pounds. I always thought she looked gorgeous. I always wanted to look like her.

And then again, I have friends who say they’d be perfectly happy to be my weight and I’m trying to lose 15 pounds more.

Perspective. And I guess the bottom line is that we all have our own perspective and that’s okay.