What’s your ideal weight? And is that the right question? I think it is not, and that a better question is: What’s your ideal life?
This line of thinking started for me last Thursday. In the spirit of the #throwbackthursday thing that people are doing on Facebook these days (posting an old picture of themselves), I thought it would be fun to pull up a picture from 9 years ago when I was on an episode of DesignU. I saw the picture below and my first reaction was ‘wow, I was really lean then. I should really get back to that weight.‘
Then I thought about what I’d have to do to get there and I quickly put that thought out of my head and and returned to being happy with my current life. There are four big contributors to my being able to dismiss the need to return to that level of lean-ness:
- I am happy with how I look right now.
- I am healthy at my current weight.
- I currently do not have any performance goals that require me to be more lean.
- I like my current lifestyle, and have no interest in doing the amount of exercise or adopting the food changes required to get to and maintain that level.
For me, it’s that simple. Something might come up that will change the third item for me one day, and if the interest is enough, then it will make me want to change the 4th item so that I will get leaner (and also get faster, or jump higher, or do more pull ups, or whatever the new goal might be). But if that happens, it won’t be to get to my “ideal weight”. It’ll be to achieve something that is meaningful for me.
Those are my motivators, and that’s why looking at a picture of me when I was more lean doesn’t make me unhappy with myself. That’s the competitive athlete version of me, but I’m not a competitive athlete right now, nor do I want to be. I’m very comfortable with that. Life is about choices.
What’s your inner dialogue about your weight? My hope is that it’s more about health, and happiness, and performance than about desires to reach a random number.