Hello, everyone, and welcome back to our Ask a Nutritionist segment of the Dishing Up Nutrition podcast.

I'm Leah Kleintrote, registered and licensed dietitian, and today we're talking about something that comes up

fairly regularly in conversations with my clients. And that topic is ideal body weight,

or in other words, the more direct question I get asked is, what should I weigh? And what I mean

with a client who wants to lose wage or weight loss is one of their goals,

they'll often come in already having a goal weight in mind. More often than not, it's a weight

they were at, usually at a previous benchmark in their life. Like when they got married,

before they changed jobs, before they started having children, when they hit a particular

birthday, et cetera, et cetera. Then often, specifically, clients will then link that previous way

to memories of having more energy, just feeling more comfortable in their own skin,

maybe feeling lighter and more

confident, less stressed, so on and so forth. And who wouldn't want to go back there?

In today's show, I want to offer up some thoughts or something to ponder. And so a couple of

questions I'll start off with is, what if you could achieve many of or all of those wonderful feelings, even if the scale doesn't end up exactly matching that same number as before?

And what if your ideal weight now isn't necessarily like your lowest or your leanest weight of the past.

Would you be okay with that?

So now we're going to put that line of thought on pause just for a few moments.

And let's chat a little bit more about ideal body weight because there are some more formal definitions of ideal body weight. Most of us have seen some kind of

chart or calculator, BMI numbers. We'll talk about that in a moment. Other things that, you know,

even been told a specific weight range that we're supposed to, you know, quote unquote,

supposed to be in. But the truth is the concept of an ideal body weight

is much more nuanced than some of those simple numbers suggest. So in this particular episode,

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