This last week I got married to my lovely fiance, now whom I am proud to call my wife. I know it seems superficial of me to remember my weight on the day of our wedding, but it was 180lbs. I've been on my honeymoon for the last few days, and I've been enjoying it. Been breaking the vegan diet slightly so I can enjoy some great seafood in Seattle. WOW it's the best I've ever had. Been to SF Bay area, been to New England, and in my opinion Seattle is my favorite. Pike's Place is awesome with all of its shops, fresh produce and fish, flowers, dealers, etc. The atmosphere here is gorgeous and inviting, it's friendly and yet bustling. It's like a friendly New York with less crime and more environmental awareness...
I already reached my original goal of 185, and I've been slowly climbing down the weight ladder. I've been really debating what my new weight goal should be. According to three different medical websites, my BMI is 26, which is still one point over the highest I should be in the "healthy" BMI range. My wife's BMI is of course in the LOW range because she's skinny and can eat whatever she wants...makes me jealous.
My freshman year in college I weighed 256, which I just realized that made my BMI about 37...wow! Weird to see that on paper. That means that I was considered medically obese for my height. It was very upsetting to me even though I haven't weighed that much in over two years. Still, I feel like more people should see what they weigh in relation to their height so that they can realize where they stand in the scale of "low" to "high", "underweight" to "obese" etc. Check out this simple calculator:
http://www.everydayhealth.com/toolkit/weightcalculator/index.aspx
According to many different sources, a BMI ranging between 18 - 25 is normal, and 19 - 24 is considered "healthy." I decided what makes sense is to just select the middleground here and get right in the center of "healthy." By these figures, that'd mean a BMI of about 21.5 - let's just round to 22 for ease. Using this same website, I tried out some different figures and found that around 155lbs for a guy of my height (5'11) was a totally healthy, middle of the road figure for weight and BMI.
Now at first my natural inclination is to say "wow that's still 30 more pounds...isn't that too much?" but then I started to realize that this isn't necessarily factoring in appearance choice (i.e., men are usually "more attractive" when they are muscular builds, and sometimes weigh more than recommended) and same with women, who are generally "preferred" to look a little bit skinnier than their medically recommended weight. Many times these calculations do not factor in age, and since I'm in my early twenties, I feel like I'm not really in the "Test zone" for most of these medical figures. So I did some more research and found this other website...
http://www.icb2001.com/What_You_Should_Weigh.asp
This website you enter in your wrist circumference along with your height and your weight and it tells you what your frame size is. I don't know how exactly accurate this is, but it told me I should weight between 132 and 179...so...the average between the two is 155. Considering that's what my other figures showed up to be, the vote seems unanimous so far: I'm still slightly overweight, and I could stand to lose up to about 30 more pounds. Crazy!
So, my new weight goal is 155. That would put me right in the middle of the healthy zone. I know it seems like a huge milestone away because I've lost over 40 pounds on this diet so far and now I'm saying to myself "hey self, lose another 30," BUT I know from my belly and my arms that I could stand to lose some more weight, and one of the hardest things to admit to oneself is that when you have extra weight, you have it EVERYWHERE, not just your belly. So if you lose 30 pounds, you lose it equally all across your body, which may only translate to 10 pounds out of your belly and 20 from all other parts including your neck, back, arms, butt, and legs. 30 pounds really starts to not look like that much when you consider THOSE things!
155 here I come!
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