Okay, back in 2009 I went to my doctor and asked him what my ideal weight would be. He said, based on my height and the BMI calculator, I should be between 150 and 180. So we settled on 170 since I didn't want to right on the upper edge of being overweight. And I even went past the 170 down to the low 160s.
However, over the winter, my weight started to creep back up to the 170 area so I started putting in more hours exercising, but my weight was not going down any. I talked to my physiotherapist who is also a personal trainer and he got a good laugh. He said my legs are solid muscle mass. He also said that I was using my Tanita body composition scale wrong. If you exercise more than 10 hours per week (I do 14) and have a resting heart rate of 60 beats per minutes or less (mine is 44), you are supposed to put the scale in "athlete mode". Which takes my body fat % from 12% down to 5%.
I think I am going to take a trip to Toronto (I was planning on heading down soon anyway to visit friends) and get a DEXA scan just be sure that I'm more towards the 5% than the 12%. I've heard from some people that any of the bioelectrical impedance scales are wildly inaccurate. But I want to have some hard statistics to take to my doctor before getting him to raise the 170. He has been reluctant in the past because he thinks that would give me the green light to eat junk food and the 170 holds me in check, but I'm having a horrible time trying to stay under that number.
The other issue is that my doctor is a firm believer in BMI, which many people believe is absolute garbage. So I guess where I am going with this is - how do *you* know what a good weight range is for yourself?
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