Getting on a soap box

Today I want to talk about what our ultimate goals are.  This email may be for those of you who are within 5-10 pounds of your goal weight, but I'd like everyone to read the email all the way through and I'd also love your feedback!!
 
Please choose from the following what goal you are striving to achieve the most:

• To be at a healthy weight I can maintain with exercising 4-6 days/week and eating clean the majority of the time.  To be happy with what body that brings to me.
• To be skinny at the cost of losing some muscle because I love weighing: ____(fill in the blank).  When I am at this weight I feel my best (mentally).

Ok, so yes I am setting this up.  

I'd like to present to you an argument today that the scale isn't the whole story!!  And that option one is the goal and I hope you can grow to want more than option 2!!

We reach a place in our weight loss journey where obsession can take the place of what was once a good goal setting journey.  We started out wanting to lose weight and we did it!!  (Let me say again this argument is for those of us who have reached our goal weight but are now facing another delimna)  

We reached our goal.  Now what?

Are you happy?  Content with what you see in the mirror?

This is what may surprise many of you: I have never met a women that is 100% happy with her body!!  And let me tell you, I've trained some beautiful women with what the world would call, perfect bodies.  But not to them.  Not in their eyes.

This is what is sooooo interesting to me!  And something, as a fitness professional, I struggle with sometimes. 

Heaven forbid, I help you reach your goal weight and never set you up to be emotionally stable/happy & spiritually strong enough to be ready for the thoughts of critism that will still arise in you about your physical body!

So there, I said it.  We will continue to look at what we don't like about our bodies, all the while admiring in others their best features. 

Once our goal weight is achieved, my hope and desire for us all would be that our goal changes away from a number on the scale, and instead to being healthy.  (Nothing wrong with weighing ourselves and keeping weight gain in check)  But what I'm saying is that we then begin approaching fitness as a lifestyle that will produce low cholesterol, and a strong heart, clean arteries, strong bones, a longer life to enjoy with others, more flexibility, greater energy to enjoy life, better sleep, and to decrease our risk for disease. 

A word of caution:  if you instead continue to focus on becoming thin at the cost of losing bone denisty, etc, then what good is being thin?

Only you know what habits you are living out day in and day out.  I'm not preaching to anyone specifically, rather a word of caution and a word to encourage us all to pursue a balance in nutrition that fosters health!  Health in mind and body.  Not a way of eating that is unhealthy to just to fit into a certain size.  

Does that make sense?

Yours in health,
Sara Oliver
www.GetToBootCamp.com
www.GoodHabits.MyShaklee180.com