For me my 210 pound "goal weight" was just a number I had to come up with because this forum required it. So I looked up my height and gender on the BMI chart - picking the first round number that fell below the "obese" category. At 210 I am overweight - not obese. When I chose 210 I had little confidence that I would ever get there. I had been in the 300 to 400+ range for two decades and the lowest I'd ever attained in my yo-yo dieting was 285 (briefly way back in 1999). So 210 was never going to happen. But it was a nice fantasy.

It took me 27 months, but I did eventually reach that goal. Most every time I'd tried to diet over the past 30 years it was a low carb diet. That's what I did this time, too. So what was different? I finally realized that this needed to be a permanent change. My old concept of temporarily "going on a diet" was all wrong and was never going to work for me. Making this "how I eat" for the rest of my life is certainly not what I thought a diet was. I also thought that cheating, "rewards", days off, etc. were part of dieting. As it turned out for me, those are the essential ingredients for diet failure. That behavior just kept me hooked on my old WOE. When I stuck to low carb food I eventually broke free from those addictive carbs. Feelings of deprivation faded. The "diet" became my new WOE. It got easy. I could sustain this. After that reaching my goal weight of 210 pounds was almost inevitable.

My max BMI in the 'normal' category is around 180 pounds, so I certainly have more weight that I could lose. Reaching goal was anticlimactic, to some degree. I wasn't going to change how I eat. I had added a few new foods to my diet those last few months - but not too many. Junky carbs stayed off of my plate. My eating after reaching goal was pretty much the same as before. I sailed right past goal. The weight loss eventually ground to a halt and this is just where I landed. I would like to lose a few more pounds. If I work at tightening up the "diet" within my WOE I'm sure I can lose more. I must continue to eat healthy food. I have no intentions of ever going back to eating junk. If I stick with what got me here I should be able to stay below the "obese" category forever. That's the hope, anyway. So I keep 210 pounds as my goal weight. It is the line I must never cross again. Anything below that and I will consider myself successfully maintaining.