The Magic Number

Some numbers are just too low.

Courtesy of the Powerhouse Museum Collection
via Flickr Creative Commons

I have a magic number. It's seared into my psyche, both beckoning and mocking me. The number is: 159.

When my first daughter was conceived, I weighed 159 pounds. It was a tall-ish and lean-ish 159 - I was a very committed cardio bunny and did light weight work, so I could wear size 8 pants and size 4/6 tops.

I'll bet big bucks that most moms out there can name their prepregnancy weights, too.

It's just a number, it's just a number, I tell myself. And yet...that 159 whispers to me. Almost every time I get on the scale, I calculate how much I'd have yet to lose to hit that number. This is absurd, because according to my body fat skin caliper tests I've gained somewhere around 15-20 lb. of muscle since I started Crossfitting last September. I'm the strongest I've ever been -- way stronger than those cardio bunny days. One of my last tests had me at 135 lb. of lean mass. If I whittled only fat down until I was 159 lb., while retaining that 135 lb. of lean mass, I'd be at 15% body fat, which is way, way, way leaner and more muscular than I was in the 159 lb. prepregnancy days.

All this to say, even though I should be reveling every day in my new strengths, my new wisdom, my new experiences, I have that magic number from the past haunting me. I have difficulty permitting the context of my current, very different state in life - avid Crossfitting, lean-mass-promoting diet, post-baby and lactation hormones, caregiving to small children, limited sleep - to soften the siren call of that old weight.

The closer I get back to 159, the more I realize that I might be riding an asymptote, and that my returns invested in training and eating right diminish, to the point where - unless I allow my hard-earned lean mass to drop - I may never see that number on the scale again.

Do you have a magic number in your head? Are you haunted by your prepregnancy weight, your high school weight, your college weight, or even another number like a former pants size or a long-ago-achieved personal lifting record? How do you deal with the magic numbers in your life? Do you believe firmly that you'll get back to them, or that life has changed enough that you've decided to allow yourself grace even while you pursue personal excellence?

~

On the Positive Flip Side of Learning My Body Fat Percentage

I recently had a skin fold calipers test to roughly estimate my percentage of body fat - as part of baselining me for my Crossfit box's nutrition challenge. While I predictably had some anxiety about discovering my body fat percentage, I found a strangely uplifting number on the flip side of that data: my lean body weight. It happens to currently be 126.65 lb.

Which is to say, if all of my body fat were to suddenly, spontaneously melt away - beside that being rather unsettling yet decidedly convenient - I'd have 126.65 lb. of muscle and sundry accounting for me.

A healthy body fat bare minimum for women is quoted at around 10-12%. So, even at my extreme leanest while still remaining healthy, I'd weigh roughly 140 lb.

140 lb?! That's essentially what I weighed in high school. I was an athlete in high school, but I never trained at the intensity levels and frequency that I now train in Crossfit.

So what?

So, if I continue to eat a paleo-oriented diet, and to train responsibly, I may very well add some more lean muscle mass, even as I continue to lose body fat. My lean muscle mass may increase to the point that a theoretically "healthy" extremely lean 12% body fat me could still weigh over 150 lb. - and I am 5'6"...5'7" on a fluffy hair day.

I could ultimately end up my leanest, strongest, healthiest self without ever coming close to the low prescribed total body weights that I've seen for my height on various tables and formulae. If I'd have to sacrifice what  hard-earned strength and muscle mass I already possess to fit some preordained one-size-fits-all metric for a 5'6" woman's body weight, then you can count me out of ever hitting that milestone.