Healthy BMI Reboot

January 1^st, 2016, I looked into the mirror and told myself: “Michael you are fat.” I know that it is not PC, but problems cannot be solved without stating the problem. I started what I called my Quest for a Healthy BMI. Target weight was for a BMI of 25 or 175. Since that time my lowest weight was167 pounds. What I discovered, is that keeping the weight off is hard. I allowed myself to gain weight back up to 195. My current seven-day moving average weight is 186.5. My current goal is 170.

Some of the reasons that I am doing this again are:

• Vanity: I liked the way I looked.

• Makes it easier to sail, dance and be active.

• I do not have support for the damage that overweight causes later in life. I do not want to be a burden to my family, friends or society.

This time around, I am not looking at BMI as the goal target. I am going to use the body fat percentage. Currently, I am 23.8% or average. I would like to be at 17% or at the fit level. The number is based on the chart from American Council on Excerse:

To my body acceptance friends (yes I have been called anorexic because I wanted to be healthy). From experience and observation, nature does not care about my feelings. These two paragraphs from Rising Obesity in the United States Is a Public Health Crisis is scary enough to get motivated again:

Obesity is a grave public health threat, more serious even than the opioid epidemic. It is linked to chronic diseases including type 2 diabetes, hyperlipidemia, high blood pressure, cardiovascular disease, and cancer. Obesity accounts for 18 percent of deaths among Americans ages 40 to 85, according to a 2013 study challenging the prevailing wisdom among scientists, which had placed the rate at around 5 percent. This means obesity is comparable to cigarette smoking as a public health hazard; smoking kills one of five Americans and is the leading preventable cause of death in the United States.

The obesity crisis may be less dramatic than the opioid epidemic now gripping the nation, but it is just as deadly. Opioids accounted for around two-thirds of the 64,000 deaths related to drug overdose in 2016. Excess body weight leading to cancer causes about 7 percent of cancer-related deaths, or 40,000 deaths each year. This number doesn’t include deaths from the many other medical conditions associated with obesity. Obese people are between 1.5 to 2.5 times more likely to die of heart disease than people with normal body mass indices (BMIs).