Maybe it’s a good thing…

I just got back from the doctor (general yearly physical; nothing is wrong). It was my first visit to her, and I actually liked her very much. However, after checking my height/weight, she remarked:

“You should try to lose about 5 pounds.”

Those are generally not words you want to hear come out of your doctor’s mouth. I guess it’s better than “you should try to lose about 50 pounds”, but still. I, however, being a strange bird, am slightly torn as to whether I should actually be happy about this and see it in a positive way.

I’ve been trying to lose weight for quite some time, but I’ve been under the assumption that it’s purely vanity weight. Being Catholic, that of course makes me feel guilty when someone offers me a treat and I turn it down. It makes me feel like I’m turning it down for “selfish” reasons. In my mind, getting to a size 2 is kind of selfish motivation for weight loss, so when my work team gets on my back about how much I work out and how healthy I eat, I think “yeah, it isn’t good for me to be so obsessed with this when I’m not even overweight or in any medical danger.”

However, my father had a heart attack in his mid-forties (he’s fine now), so my doctor said she would like to see my weight on the low end of normal rather than on the middle to high end. It makes sense. I also need to watch my cholesterol, which I haven’t currently been doing. I never thought I eat a high-cholesterol diet (I don’t cook high-cholesterol foods), but now that I’m traveling and eating out for every meal, that may not be the case. I get the results of my cholesterol test back on Monday. It’s kind of weird that I’m worried about a cholesterol test when I’m a pretty fit, healthy woman in her early twenties, but better to catch something like that now than when I’m a stressed-out, overweight consultant in her 30s who has a heart attack in a client meeting.

It’s really not pleasant to have a doctor tell you to lose weight, but maybe this will be just the motivation I need?