After wrestling my weight down to a healthier level, I have been very carefully maintaining the 15-pound weightloss I achieved last summer. As is typical I guess, I have held on to another 5-pound weightloss goal. This goal helps keep me from having as many seconds as I want and eating when I’m not even hungry.
But one thing finally sank in recently. I realize that when I weighed almost 140 pounds (I’m only 5’2″), I ate to maintain 140 pounds. In order to lose weight, I had to eat for a lower weight. Now that I hover around 123 pounds, I’m eating to maintain 123 pounds. It’s not easy or instinctive and I really have to pay attention, especially when I have a bad week (I tend to binge on sweets under stress. Recently after a party, I ate half of a sheet-cake over a period of three days. Big surprise that I’m currently working to lose the couple of pounds that put on).
But in order to achieve that fantasy below-120 lbs., I will have to eat fewer calories, not just to achieve the weightloss, but to maintain it. Do I want to live at below-120, eating only as many calories as below-120 needs? NO. I’m barely happy now, eating to maintain 123. To maintain below-120, I’d really have to eliminate sweets, really limit snacking, really strip any extra fat from my meals and/or add more exercise to my already six-days-a-week routine. I don’t wanna!
So, I am finally, for the first time since I was too little to think about my body (10 years old? Nine?), finally accepting my body as it is and declaring it JUST FINE. I will carefully, strategically work to maintain my 123 lbs. with exercise and diet every day and I will consider it good and start truly enjoying my physical body. I have hips. Hips feel great. I love walking with my hips, working with them, not against them (as I used to do from 11 to 37 years old). Five feet two inches and 123 pounds is just fine and I will stay here. That is, until in the future my aging metabolism slows enough and my aging skeleton loses enough height that I have to cut calories again. I just can’t think about it…
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