Another week gone...

and a net loss of zero compared to last Friday. I have, for half a year, been plateauing around this level, with a variance of two kilos up or down from it. I´d be roundabout ten kilos further down without that plateau, had I continued to lose the way I did last year. 
It is mega frustrating. And every weekend has in it the danger of going back up with the weight, if it is only because I eat regular meals on weekends. Down during the week, up on weekends. One step forward, one step back. And this weekend is DH´s birthday, too, so sticking to protein shakes is not really an option.

How that frustration clicks with what I wrote yesterday? Well, I have been different weights at different times in my life, and I have some memories left of what it felt like to be in my body at these weights.
I remember how lousy I felt at top weight, I know I´m feeling better at what I weigh now, and I remember that there was a time when I was carrying less weight than today when I felt a lot better than today.
Athletes, too, have a weight where their bodies are functioning optimally for their sport. I think they call it competition weight.
I don´t want to compete against anyone. I just want to live in a body that is functioning at its best level, and for that, I still have to get off some more weight.
But the target weight I have in mind isn´t my all-time lowest weight-for-this-height  any more. I will never again have the size I had as an eighteen-year old. My body proportions have changed, after all, I wasn´t fully grown back then. Reaching my full height just meant that my body was still having to grow horizontally to its full size.
Witness an old jacket I wore when eighteen, that had somehow survived in a closet at my parents´place. When I held that up to my body  for size, I found that the shoulder part was cut narrower than the bones in my shoulders are today. The bones, mind you, not any fat on top of them. So, even if I were to hunger myself down to said bones, the thing would no longer fit.
Which means that the genetic shape of my grown-up body is such that I will never again weigh what I weighed at eighteen, simply because of the different proportions.
What I am aiming for now is the weight that my body had gone up to from there, before I started trying to force my body below that weight again,ending up with forty extra kilos on top of those ten that would, probably, have been where my body might have stayed had I not decided to mess with it.
I am, by now, about halfway back there, and I am determined to go the other half of the way, too, because that was the weight my body felt best at. Incidentally, it´s also where the "normal" BMI range would start for me.
My weight history, thus, is almost a textbook example of the old adage that you should never try to fix something that is not broken.
Today, I just wish I had not messed with my body so much, because getting the extra pounds off is a b**** with the kind of metabolism that more than a quarter-century of intermittingly dieting and bingeing left me with.

I wish someone had told me that when I started...


Julia