The Real Reason You Can't Lose Those Last Five Pounds

From Madison mag, January 08 – page 160-162.

So apparently most dieters don’t have emotional support so they “fall off the wagon”. And happily, Weight Watchers is there to provide it with regular meetings and a survival guide to “keep your mind, body and mouth under control”.

(There it is again, that expectation that you *will* show how controlled a person you are by adopting a restrictive eating regime.)

The article repeats the ‘wisdom’ that if your BMI is over 25, you’re overweight and at risk of developing high blood pressure, heart disease and type 2 diabetes. It then summarized what you can expect in mind, diet, and body during the first 24 hours, first week, first month, three months, and one year later – and now you’re within a healthy BMI range. Easy. Get on with it and get yourself under control already!

Of course we know that the BMI doesn’t take into account factors like your muscle mass, whether you exercise, the nutritional value of the food you actually eat, whether you smoke, or use safe sex practices. All it does is provide a statistical description of the physical size of the population, and that’s all it was ever meant to do. Instead it was adopted as a way to decide if you’re overweight or not – and that’s patently ridiculous. Loads of research shows that you’re only at risk of the lifestyle diseases mentioned above if you’re at the extreme end of the BMI, and that’s approaching 40. The risk of almost every one of the lifestyle diseases practically disappears if you have moderate exercise, that is about three half-hour reasonably paced walks per week. And those results come in in almost every study into weight and exercise.

So I reckon, forget those last five kilos, get out there and walk or swim or ride a bike or kick a ball around with your friends or kids, play Frisbee with your dog, whatever – just get moving and forget the weight thing. Moving gives you so many benefits, including to your emotional state, that it will be much easier to accept that you’re a human and perfect exactly as you are!

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Sandy

Hey there, I'm Sandy Ross. I hope to inspire women to feel kinder to themselves and their amazing bodies so they can co-create the life they've always dreamed of. I'm a holistic counsellor, journalist, energy-centred teacher, delighted mother of two amazing adult women, and mentor to the 4000+ women in my tribe. I live in beautiful sub-tropical Brisbane in Australia.