Is weight a measure?

Is weight a good indicator of how healthy a person is? 78% of people I asked stated that it was and that they had to lose just a few more pounds to feel better. 12% of the people I asked didn’t know and the remaining 10% of the people didn’t care.

Is weight a good measure of how healthy one is? In some cases, if you are 5’8” and weigh 300 pounds, yeah you can do better, but when does the weight thing stop? Does it ever stop?

Let’s take, for example, the person I mentioned above, the one who is 5’8” and 300 pounds. Is it the weight they have to lose or is it their activity they have to increase? The old question of what came first, the chicken or the egg, comes to mind with this situation. However, for anyone needing or wanting to lose weight, they must first get active enough for the body to use the fuel which it has stored. Yeah, you could stop eating but that won’t last very long before your body will give up and you’ll pass out.

I have a client that came to me, he was 5’9” tall and weighed 590 pounds. To say that he wasn’t active was an understatement. When I asked him what his goals were, he told me one thing, to lose weight. I was going to explain to him why losing weight should never be a goal but in his case I needed to work with him for a bit, before educating him on that. His first workout lasted 17 seconds. Yep, there is no type-o there, 17 seconds on the treadmill. To make a long story short, as he kept active, he noticed that he was losing more and more weight and it was staying off.

After a year, he had lost half his body weight and he was looking so much better. We sat down and talked about his journey, which wasn’t at all easy. One thing he realized, and I didn’t have to tell him, is that as he became more active the weight seemed to melt off of him. This encouraged him to begin planning activity goals. He got it! Losing weight should never be the goal but a satisfying result of being a more active, healthy and happier you. 7 years later the weight has stayed off and he is still very active.

Again, weight should never be the goal. Why? Because it’s almost impossible to maintain any specific number. You must look at your activity level and improve upon that. Activities are something you can plan and then achieve. Remember, never use weight as a final measure of whether or not you are in shape but use the level of your activity as that bench mark.