I have recently lost 9kg over the span of 4 months to go from the higher end of a healthy BMI to the lower end of a healthy BMI for aesthetics purely. Throughout my life, I have never been properly skinny, except when I was a kid. When I was a teenager, I was overweight and at some point border-line obese, but I was able to get back down to a healthy weight by simple lifestyle changes like decreasing portions and cutting out junk a long time ago. However, I was never able to get under 61kg at 164cm unless I was sick. I usually maintained between 61-63.5kg. However, I never like to get above 63.5kg because it is too close to overweight for me.
I was not overweight, technically, but I was not skinny either. I observed the women at my college and wished that I had figures like them. My dream weight since I was 14 has always been 54kg. I spent time, oddly (this sounds disordered as hell), just obsessively calculating the BMIs of random female celebrities, influencers, and models, and I noticed that almost none of them had a BMI of over 22. I also read about the most desirable BMI being 17-20 in men (oddly, I am not too interested in male attention - there is the feeling that I just want to "maximize" my looks for the shits and giggles.) (I know BMI isn't 100% of a perfect indicator of health at times and does not take lean muscle mass into account, but my thought process loves numbers like these to use as a reference and benchmark). This made me realize that the beauty standard is essentially women who are borderline underweight, unfortunately. I also felt bad because I saw people like Billie Eilish being mocked for being "fat" when she had a similar figure to me. I could envision people saying similar things about me.
At some point, I started counting calories, using measuring spoons and cups and whatnot; I set a goal of about 1200 calories daily, but really, I ended up more at 1200-1400 due to inaccuracies. At some point, I bought a food scale, and that was a big game changer. I lost about 7 pounds that month (though, I suspect that a bit of it was water weight.) It required an insane amount of precision, though. When I was overweight years ago, I seriously didn't have to count calories - all I had to do was cut out bullshit and make better choices. But, at a healthy weight, it seriously required all of my effort to ensure that I was at a deficit and still receiving the right amount of nutrients. With my TDEE already being quite low, one
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