My Wife Challenged Me About My Goal Weight

[CFLBob]

I’ve posted here about more or less reluctantly being in maintenance. I mean, I’m trying to lose another five pounds to get to the bottom of a range I considered my goal weight.

Last night, my wife sort of challenged me about my goal weight and continuing fasting.

I have to admit that my goal is pretty much pulled outta the air. Nobody gave it to me, and I just made it up, mostly because I haven’t been that weight in probably 50 years and it sounds cool. My goal is 187 and I’m currently just under 192. That said, it’s literally just a PFA number. My doc said he was fine with me under 200.

Her point is that in the last few weeks, I’ve been taking vitamins to make up for potential nutrient shortages and if those shortages are real and are from my alternate day fasts not allowing enough of those nutrients, is that the right thing to do?

According to my Renpho scale, I’m 23.3 % bodyfat. According to “some site I saw online”, that’s well into the ideal range for my age. Toward the bottom, really. If I lost that five pounds and it was entirely fat (never happens), that would take me to 21% fat which is the bottom of the ideal range. So what? Yeah, I realize the Renpho isn’t as accurate as a DEXA but I’ve tried to find one locally and can’t (nor can I find a CAC scan - information that’s many times more important).

I guess my question comes down to: is pursuing that last 5 pounds crossing into neurotic? At times I think it might be.

[David_Stilley]

My question about this is why you need to gain body fat throughout your life? What’s the benefit? Is it just a range of averages? What’s wrong with having 12% body fat at age 60+? Are these just numbers that reflect it’s normal to put on fat as a concession to eating the SAD? Don’t you see that people who live to be 100 are always lean, not pleasantly chubby? This kind of chart is useless to me in my goals. It’s like saying it’s okay to be overweight cause you’re old now. Not on my watch, for me anyways. Lean and mean body and a healthy mind. I’m going down with my one leg kicking!

[ctviggen]

I guess my question comes down to: is pursuing that last 5 pounds crossing into neurotic? At times I think it might be.

Your guess is as good as anyone else’s. This data is based on epidemiological studies, which prove correlation not causation. It’s impossible to know what “idea” weight is.

I am about 30 pounds higher than I was in my 20s (55 now). I was also way more muscular back then. I’m still slowly losing weight, just dropped another pants size. But pushing to get 30 pounds lighter by, say, fasting more, I’m not sure what that gets me.

I still fast regularly, and will continue I assume on a slow downward path, but I think trying to achieve a number solely because it’s a number might not be a great idea.

It’s like when I joined a gym (closer to work – have had a gym membership and used gyms since forever) and they asked me what my goals were. My goals were simply to get to the gym a few days a week and not re-injure any of my many injuries. “Get to the gym sometimes” is not a great goal for them.

[Ruina]

Sounds like you’ve got a wise woman there.

If I were you I’d check out the MetLife weight charts. They are based on actual health outcomes. And it means saving money for them to tell the truth. The healthy weight range is a few pounds higher than BMI charts, and also breaks it down into three frame sizes.

You also have to keep in mind that the range of “healthy” weights doesn’t mean that the lower you go, as long is it isn’t below the lowest weight, is healthier. It means that depending on your muscles and bones and other factors, you ideal weight at this height is somewhere in this range. So someone with a lot of musculature and heavy bones will be healthy at a higher weight than someone with lighter bones and less muscle mass. It doesn’t mean that the lighter person is unhealthy. Just that they have a different body composition.

I feel healthier at the top end of the BMI range for a woman of my height. But we have other women on the forum at my height or taller that weigh less then I do and feel good. My “range” is 117-145 by BMI and 120ish-151 by MetLife. If I go under 130, that is not a good thing for me. I am currently, over the past year at about 147. I would love to get to 140 as my low weight for the month.

Anything below 155 and my Chinese friends, who at the same height are shocked if they weigh over 110, tell me that I look “standard” aka a healthy weight and not fat. And never fear… Chinese friends will always be honest about how you look.

So what I am saying with all this is… if you think you aren’t getting enough nutrients from your food, you aren’t eating enough. We were disigned to get what we need from food, not pills, to maintain our lives. Pills are good for when we are sick, not when we are healthy.

So my take-away is that you either do not need the supplements, or do not need the fasting.

[CFLBob]

My question about this is why you need to gain body fat throughout your life? What’s the benefit?

It’s all correlation and not causation, as Bob @ctviggen points out, but there are plenty of reports that say having some margin in bodyfat is a survival advantage in the event of having to be hospitalized. That can happen to anyone at any age (let me tell you about getting hit by a pickup truck while bike riding). As you age, the chance of some other reason putting you in the hospital goes up as well. Not all of those can be the result of things that fitness might help prevent (let me tell you about my gall bladder going bad without the decency to send me a postcard warning me).

There used to be an RN with a blog called Junk Food Science, where Junk modified science not food, who would say, “how often do these paradoxical results that a little higher body fat isn’t bad for you have to appear before we stop calling them paradoxical?”

[CFLBob]

I am about 30 pounds higher than I was in my 20s (55 now).

The last time I’m sure I was below my current weight would have been in high school, so I’ll say 48 years ago. It’s one reason I think that I’m probably OK where I am. By contrast, I recall where I was the first time a doctor gave me a 1200 calorie a day diet. That was 20 pounds above where I am now, and maybe 46 years ago.

I think trying to achieve a number solely because it’s a number might not be a great idea.

I think that’s a good insight.

EDIT to add:

@Ruina - I’ve never put any faith in BMI. Zero. Exactly because BMI is just another way of doing the Metlife Height/Weight tables we grew up with. If you put weight and height into an equation, all you get out is some sort weight/height ratio, there’s not new information there. What does weight/(height squared) tell you?

When they first started talking about BMI, I started to pay attention, then I saw that athletes almost universally came out as obese or worse. There was a basketball player in the Orlando professional team who was measured at 5% bodyfat, and his BMI came out as obese. Due to the higher density of muscle than fat, the measurement is biased against fit people.

So what I am saying with all this is… if you think you aren’t getting enough nutrients from your food, you aren’t eating enough. We were disigned to get what we need from food, not pills, to maintain our lives. Pills are good for when we are sick, not when we are healthy.

This, I think, is pure gold.

[David_Stilley]

@CFLBob Okay so I get the cushion effect that you get from fat if you have a traumatic accident (I think I read your account of the pickup vs bike). It’s like having a bunch of hair on your head, and when you shave it off and hit your head it hurts like hell compared to when you had hair. And I have been hospitalized and had surgery more times than I can count as well as. I don’t get the survival after surgery need for fat in a hospital. Maybe if you can’t eat but they always have a way to do that. Surgery is much easier if they don’t have to deal with excess body fat. I’ve always been encouraged to loose weight before surgery. I dropped about 30 lbs to get a kidney transplant to make it easier for the surgeons and for quicker healing.

I’d rather not live my life planning on disasters that may never come. You just can’t figure all the angles where problems might get you. I just do my best now to keep the machine running as strong as possible. I’m 5’10” and 149 lbs at 60. My mother thinks that’s too light of a weight and tells me almost every time we talk or text. I’ve tried to explain several times that the number on the scale doesn’t matter, I still have fat that I could loose. She can’t seem to grasp that I am missing a leg, don’t have a lot of muscle mass and I function 100x better at this low weight. Those arbitrary goal numbers we set are usually wrong. My original goal was 168. I looked good at 40 with this weight. At 60 I looked fat. I’m in a maintenance range now and hope to have some body recomposition to lower body fat further without loosing much more weight.

[HeleneS]

Welcome to maintenance. I have only been here for about 2 months but truth is it is not that much different than what came before. Perhaps if you do not want to fast and eat vitamins to compensate for lack of food for the rest of your life you may want to slowly start transitioning towards what you see as your longtime eating life. You may perhaps even still lose in that transitioning period.

[CFLBob]

Okay so I get the cushion effect that you get from fat if you have a traumatic accident (I think I read your account of the pickup vs bike).

I don’t think that’s the mechanism they talked about. I think it’s post-traumatic event survival while fasting, but as you say, they inevitably pump us full of sugar and cut off access to fat by raising insulin.

We’re not talking lots of weight, just that as a general rule people with a bit more safety margin, say 20% BF instead of 10% BF are more likely to survive. It’s like higher BMI heart attack patients surviving better.

I’ve always been encouraged to loose weight before surgery

I’ll assume you weren’t 149 lb.s then. I think we’ve both heard that a lot of bariatric surgeons get patients to lose weight before surgery to make it easier and less traumatic. You know for sure they’re not underweight.

BMI numbers and recommended weight numbers are pretty useless, and especially for someone like you without one leg. If you changed to a heavy prosthetic leg would that suddenly make you overweight and need to compensate? Of course not.

[ctviggen]

There used to be an RN with a blog called Junk Food Science, where Junk modified science not food, who would say, “how often do these paradoxical results that a little higher body fat isn’t bad for you have to appear before we stop calling them paradoxical?”

I remember that. Wasn’t she very pro-sugar though?

I tend to agree that having a “cushion” as one gets older might be a good thing. If you look at charts, the thinnest and heaviest always fare the worst (and this is epi garbage, so there’s a lot of interpretation, such as maybe the thinnest are that way because they’re sick, etc.). But if you’re a Ted Naiman, with low body fat at 75+, and you get pneumonia and are hospitalized, on what do you survive? Certainly not hospital food - that stuff will kill you.

And I’m always hesitant with numbers. I’ve seen people say that an HbA1c of 4.x is “ideal”, and I got to 4.9 but am “up” to 5.1 (both probably within error ranges anyway), and I doubt I could get any lower unless I really begin starving myself all the time. But if I did that, would I really be “healthier” to the point it would extend my life?

If you want to extend your life, get out and do something with people. Volunteer. Make sure to keep cultivating your family connections, and if they’re broken, fix them. We humans need interactions, and these will keep you healthier a whole hell of a lot longer than will 5-10 fewer (edit: took out “extra” here) pounds.

[Diygurl19]

That chart, looking at the pictures of the men, how old are they? Does it take into consideration your age? If I’m a man with 30% BF, according to the chart I should be between 41-45 years old. What if I’m 60 years old? or 25 years old with 28% bf ? I just don’t see how your age has anything to do with it.

[ctviggen]

If you look at the Body Fat Percentage in Men, if you’re 56, “ideal” is 21-26 percent body fat, whereas if you’re 21, ideal is 10-15%.

According to my last DEXA scan over a year ago, I was about 35% fat, but I’m down another 7 pounds or so, and I’m stronger. For my age (55), it’ll be tough to get to 25%. Luckily, next year, I’ll have 26% to use.

[amwassil]

I’m 6’0" and have always been fairly lean. I’m currently 74 and started keto when I was 71. I weigh 145; BMI is 19; body fat is 12-13%; and I feel good. I’d like more upper body muscle mass but I’ve never had that (even when young and athletic) and the chances I’ll get it now are not promising.

For what it’s worth I always ate basically ad librum SAD. My motivation to start keto was primarily for health benefits, but I decided to lose some weight as well since I was heavier than I had ever been at any time in my life (~175-180 pounds). I felt ‘pudgy’ and didn’t like that feeling. My target was 160 pounds and I ended up at 150 by the time I stopped losing. A year after that I got a full-time job at Walmart and began losing weight again, so upped my daily calories a little to stop it. Since, my weight has been stable at 145 +/- a pound or two.

Based on my experience, it seems that the body has an ‘ideal’ weight towards which it trends unless you either eat far more or less than you need to meet your daily requirements, or have some metabolic derangement going on. Fortunately, I do not and have never had any metabolic disorders to deal with. My maintenance ‘window’ seems to be about +/-200 calories around my daily target of 2700 or so. If I exceed that window either way for more than 3-4 days in a row I will lose/gain weight.

I guess what I’m saying is that if your ‘goal’ is something different from whatever your body’s ‘ideal’ happens to be, you gotta work hard to accomplish it and work steadily to maintain it. So if that last 5 pounds seems monumental, maybe it is. Then, if you’re someone who likes a challenge just go for it.

[CFLBob]

That chart, looking at the pictures of the men, how old are they? Does it take into consideration your age? If I’m a man with 30% BF, according to the chart I should be between 41-45 years old. What if I’m 60 years old? or 25 years old with 28% bf ? I just don’t see how your age has anything to do with it.

I don’t have the slightest clue how to answer that. I looked it up online so you know it has to be true.

It’s supposed to represent what some definition of typical guy would look like at that bodyfat range. The numbers are different for women, but you know that.

[David_Stilley]

@Diygurl19 I don’t know what chart you’re looking at, I see a column of age ranges in blue on the left side.

[David_Stilley]

https://www.ketogenicforums.com/uploads/default/original/3X/c/c/ccf950bce1d917c835d9366fcbb5dffb02970923.jpeg

[CrackerJax]

Lean and mean body and a healthy mind. I’m going down with my one leg kicking!

Love it !!!

[Diygurl19]

My point is - other than your age, how is it determined what your body fat % should be? why should age be a factor? Just curious.

[amwassil]

I just don’t see how your age has anything to do with it.

For men, age affects testosterone levels which in turn affects everything else. Testosterone generally declines with age. So men generally have to work harder and harder to prevent the slow but steady accumulation of fat. Not many have the incentive to do so - hence ‘body fat % creep’ as we get older. This is definitely aggravated by SAD, which can/does cause multiple metabolic problems! There is individual variation as well, of course.

[ctviggen]

Age is a factor in everything. The biggest risk factor for any disease is age.

Now, should it be like this? It’s like this because this is what people were like whenever they did the study/studies upon which this is based. Does this mean these are really true? No. If you look at the Maasai tribe, for instance, I’ve seen pictures of men where even the older men are basically ripped. Maybe that’s the way we should be?

Alas, for those of us who gained 100+ pounds, it’s much more difficult to get back to that. And it may not be possible.