What is my ideal weight?

Do you ever wonder..."what is my ideal weight' - the weight at which I will be my healthiest?

Here's the good news, you don’t need another height vs weight chart, or BMI charts. You don’t need to obsess about calories, starve yourself, exercise, take unhealthy (and often banned) diet pills in order to be healthy in order to achieve a healthy lifestyle or health.

I know this is not what you commonly hear, but we can be healthy at a much larger range of weights than we're told. You can find out a lot more about that in this 'Weight, health....and a few questions' CD.

But here’s the good news – you can stop asking, what is my ideal weight and instead ask what is a healthy weight range. When you look at aging health and wellness studies you'll find many examples of people who live long and healthy lives having being supposedly 'overweight' around age 70. For example Dr. Kawas found this in her 90+ study. By the way, she also found that these people did not worry and stress about their diet.

You can stop dedicating so much of your brain energy to food and diet; fat and weight loss. You can learn to love your body, to trust it, to nurture it and treat it – and yourself – with love and kindness and that will do wonders for your health. And when you learn to do that you will finally feel free and your body will reach it's naturally sustainable weight as a side effect of your self-nurturing attitudes.

Do you compare yourself?

I see you paging through that magazine, looking at the models and wishing you had a thigh gap, or a six-pack or arms that are trim and toned. Even super-models are jealous of other models and endure diet-obsessed, insecure, unhealthy and eating-disordered lives. Even they are photoshopped into unattainable perfection in a world where even ‘ideal’ is never perfect enough. And let's not forget that the 'what is my ideal weight' idea changes depending on where you are in the world.

And much of what you perceive as being ideal has nothing to do with you, and everything to do with what you’ve been socialised to believe. And it’s robbing you of vibrant living; of having a normal relationship with your body, with food, with movement.

The idea of the 'perfect weight'

The other thing to consider is that the word ‘ideal weight’ means different things to different people.

Some think it’s the ideal weight at which they would be sexy and desirable. But women think men want skinnier women than in reality and men think women want bigger muscles than they do.
Others think it’s the so-called 'normal weight' at which they'll be healthy - but even experts can't agree on what healthy is.

It turns out, ‘ideal weight’ is all a matter of cultural and historical perspective, and something our culture 'makes up'. And that wouldn't be such a big deal except that cultural ideals clash with naturally sustainable biological weight needs, because of the disgracefully mis-leading weight loss and beauty industries which steps in and sets us up for failure when we try to reach body weights lower than our biology requires.

What we’re sold as our 'healthy ideal weight' turns out to be nothing of the sort if longevity is anything to go by.

What do you trust to help you answer the 'what is my ideal weight' question?

......a mis-leading weight industry, whose sole motivation is to keep you buying their products.

It's hard to trust weight loss advice that 'works' for only 5% of the population. As Traci Mann head of The Food Lab says: “... you can't believe anything that they say. And that's by definition, because their job isn't to tell you the truth — it's to make money... These companies make their money off failure, not success. They need you to fail, so you'll pay them again."

....your unique biology, tailor-made for you which reliably tells you:

when you are hungry, (and how hungry you are)
when you've had enough (and also when you have had insufficient and too much)
what foods feed and fuel it well...and which you enjoy

AND best of all - your body has your best interests at heart - it's only motivation, is to keep you healthy. And reaching a place of peace around 'what is my ideal weight' is a health measure in itself.

Why you CAN trust your body

You don't meddle with the billions of other functions your incredible body simultaneously undertakes day-in and day-to take care of us.

As a new-born we cried when we were hungry and fell asleep or turned away when we'd had enough. Plenty of research done by Dr. Leanne Birch and her team at Penn State University shows that young children are very successfully able to self-regulate their eating....until... those abilities become eroded by cultural impositions around eating.

It’s simple, but it’s not easy. It’s difficult to trust your body fully when your ideas around weight and diet have been so distorted, and you've been taught to mistrust yourself. It’s difficult to challenge cultural norms when you are constantly led to believe that you are not good enough and that your body shape and size determine your worth.

But if you're tired of being part of the 98% who suffer from 'normative discontent' about their bodies, and being at war with food, then it's time to ask yourself a few questions:

Is this the way I want to live?
Are these ideals I want to support?
Is this what I want to give my life energy to?

We need a new paradigm what is my ideal weight range replaces the very narrow definition we currently have.

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