Ban the scales aka BMI is Bulls**t - a Thinking Slimmer update

It's been a while since I posted about my Thinking Slimmer progress. I am still listening to my Slimpods most nights of the week. While I feel that my relationship with food has changed completely I am very much aware that as my training steps up a gear I am likely to get more hungry and that could be a trigger for me to start eating more than I need to. I know that as long as I listen to my pods on a regular basis that won't happen.

So over 8 months into my Thinking Slimmer journey how much weight have I lost now? The honest answer is that I don't know and I don't care. I haven't weighed myself in weeks and I have no intention of doing so anytime soon. I have banned the scales!

So what has caused me to fall out of love with the previous measure of my slimming success that I have held so dear for so many years?

Quite simply because they have the power to change the way I feel when I step on them and most of the time it's not been in a positive way. I refuse to give them that power any longer.

I started Thinking Slimmer back in May 2011 and since July I've been measuring myself once every month or so. In the last 8 months I have lost a total of 16.2 inches across the whole of my body, including a whopping 5.5 inches from my tummy. That's a lot of inches and means that I've lost nearly 2 dress sizes.
Despite the fact that I have been getting smaller there have been months gone by when the scales have not moved at all. There are lots of reasons why this might be the case but it's probably mostly explained by my increased muscle mass due to all the exercise I've been doing.

Even though I can feel my clothes getting looser and that my wardrobe now contains lots of clothes in smaller sizes, stepping on the scales still had the ability to make me feel like I wasn't making any progress.

The final straw came just after Christmas. I'd weighed myself and was pleased to see that I'd not gained any weight over Christmas but was still not happy with the number that I saw looking back at me. For some reason I decided to calculate my BMI and was horrified to find that despite all the inches I've lost that I am still classified as obese on the BMI scALE.

Yes that's me, in the picture on the right, wearing a size 14 dress and classified as not just overweight but obese.

Now, don't get me wrong, I don't look at that photo and see a slim person yet - I still want to lose more inches and will be happy once I've lost another dress size. But to be classified as obese is just wrong in my opinion. No wonder so many women in this country have body image issues.

So that was it for me and the scales. They went in the cupboard and they're not coming out again. It's all about the inch loss for me now. I have just ordered my 'target dress' in a size 12 and although it won't fit me just yet it will by the time we go on holiday in June. Thanks to Thinking Slimmer I can say that with confidence.

That's a better feeling than any number on a set of scales could ever give me.