The Number They Told Me to Aim For

An open letter to anyone who released significant weight and was told they needed to lose more 

I weighed well over three hundred pounds for most of my adult life.

I released a hundred and seventy pounds. And then I realized I wasn't even close to the number I was told I had to reach for. And what I learned trying to reach it is what I'm going to tell you about today.

I want to tell you this story because I think a lot of you reading this are living some version of it right now.

Some of you tried, or even reached that number, only to live in constant crisis. Gripping the two scales — the food scale and the weight scale — desperately trying to hang on to that number. And there is a very basic reason your hunger, your shivering, and the impossibility of trying to maintain it kept you struggling.

Or you tried, got so very discouraged when you couldn't get close, and you just gave up.

Or you hated what you looked like in the mirror. This isn't what I signed up for. And you fleshed those wrinkles out again.

Or some measure of all three.

Whatever brought you here, I want to tell you this story. Because nobody has told it to you straight. And by the end of it, you'll understand things about your own body — and the system that's been measuring it — that nobody has bothered to explain.

Before the Release

Before I tell you about the release, I have to tell you about what came before it.

I had been heavy my whole adult life. Decades. Three hundred pounds. More than three hundred pounds. I'd released significant weight before in my life. I'd regained it. I'd done the cycle that almost every woman in this body knows.

And by the time I was fifty-eight, I had given up completely.

I didn't believe it would ever happen again. I had stopped trying. I had built a life around being this size. I had stopped grieving it. I wasn't even sad about it anymore. I was just—done.

And then I was diagnosed with Type Two diabetes. And high cholesterol.

And I had a moment with myself.

I wasn't going to live my life on loads of medications. I wasn't going to lose my limbs or my eyesight. Not when I knew, in my body and in my heart and brain, that I could fix this. By changing my food.

So I did. Two years of strict, regimented recovery. What was called a crystal vase. Careful. Specific. Held with both hands.

And then this thing happened that I had not expected. That I had stopped believing was possible. That I had genuinely given up on.

The weight started coming off. And it kept coming off. A hundred and seventy pounds.

I didn't set out to release the weight. I set out to save my own life from diabetes. The release was the side effect of saving my life.

They Said 125

And then I got told a number.

My goal weight, according to the standard charts for my height — I'm five foot three on a good day — was one hundred and fifteen pounds. Plus ten pounds for excess skin.

Now, ten pounds is approximately the amount they remove during a tummy tuck. That's what we were told to use. That's the number that came from — what's removed during a tummy tuck. That's what they said was the way to arrive at a proper number for someone like me.

So one hundred and twenty-five pounds. That was supposed to be my number.

I wanted to see 125 on the scale.

I worked so hard. I'd done what almost nobody who carries this kind of weight ever does. I'd released a hundred and seventy pounds in my late fifties, after decades of believing I couldn't.

And they told me I was supposed to look like Christie Brinkley.

Christie Brinkley.

A woman who never carried three hundred pounds. A woman whose body never had to absorb the years my body absorbed. A woman whose skin never had to stretch the way mine did.

That was the goal. That was the number that was going to mean I had succeeded.

I got to one hundred and forty-seven pounds. And I could not go lower.

Hunger had been my bestie for years. But now? Now it was ravenous. It was the kind of hunger that wakes you up at night. The kind that makes you cold all the way through your bones. The kind that strips your body of the will to do anything but eat.

My skin was hanging all over the place. Living in Southern California, I was told—“nothing that three-quarter length sleeves and capris can't hide.”

That was the advice.

Hide it.

The Spa

When I reached the released-half-my-body-weight milestone — one hundred and fifty-seven pounds — I wanted to mark it. To celebrate it. So I booked a day at the Korean Spa in SoCal.

And I got out of the shower. And I realized something.

People see overweight bodies all day long. They see thin bodies. They have been trained to look at both. They know what to think about them. What to say about them.

But what are they gonna make of THIS one?

They don't see Angel Wings. They don't see Sharpei's eyebrows on my cute little bottom. They don't see Waterfalls.

My body had become a category the world didn't have a name for. And I panicked. This wasn't supposed to happen. After all this work, I was supposed to be celebrating.

I went in anyway. And eventually I realized most people had better things to do than stare at me.

But the moment of panic was real. The moment of being unreadable was real. The moment of realizing my body had become a category no one had a name for — that was real.

And I think a lot of you reading this know exactly what I'm talking about.

And I want to be honest about something else. Because it wasn't just the spa. It wasn't just strangers.

Capris and three-quarter sleeves can hide a lot. They can't hide it when you want to be naked with someone.

The grief of this body isn't just about how the world sees us. It's about how we let ourselves be seen. By the people we love. In the moments that matter most.

That's part of what we're carrying too.

The DEXA Scan

After the spa, I decided I needed real data. I needed to understand what was actually in this body of mine.

So I went to get a DEXA scan to find out my body fat percentage. To make informed decisions.

What I learned changed how I understood everything that had happened to me.

I'm going to tell you this because I want every woman who has released significant weight to know it.

DEXA scanners do not recognize excess skin as a body part.

They don't.

And here's what I had to figure out the hard way. The machines were calibrated for bodies that hadn't done what ours have done. People who have released this much weight, with this much excess skin — we weren't on the radar yet. There weren't enough of us. The engineers didn't know we existed.

So when the algorithm hits tissue it can't categorize, it puts it somewhere. And for excess skin, it generally classifies it as lean tissue.

Lean. Not fat. Lean.

Now, here's what that means. The DEXA scan still gives you a body fat percentage on your report. But that percentage doesn't know about your excess skin. Nobody is doing the math to factor it in. So the number on the report — whatever it says — can't actually tell you whether your body has room to lose more fat or whether your body is already at its floor.

And mine was already at its floor.

My body fat percentage — the part of me that wasn't excess skin — was probably already at the edge of what's safe for a woman my age. Right at essential. My body's ravenous hunger, the shivering, the impossibility of losing another pound — that was my body protecting me. And the DEXA report couldn't show it. Because nobody was subtracting out the skin.

And the people interpreting the scan told me—“Well, if your body can't get below one hundred and forty-seven no matter what you do, you should just take that number and exercise more. Push harder.”

Do you understand what they were telling me to do?

They were looking at a number. The tool they were using couldn't show them what that number actually meant for my body. Nobody was doing the math to find out. And they told me to keep going.

And I almost listened.

I almost kept pushing. I almost ate less. I almost tried to lose those extra pounds. I almost tried to look like Christie Brinkley one more time.

I want you to imagine what would have happened to me if I had.

Nobody at that scan was being malicious. Nobody wanted to hurt me. They genuinely didn't know. They didn't know how much excess skin I was actually carrying. They didn't understand it was at least thirty-five, maybe forty pounds. Not ten. They didn't know the algorithm was misreading it as lean. They didn't know what it would have cost me if I had followed their advice.

It wasn't malice. It was absence. The science wasn't there yet. There weren't enough of us yet for anyone to write the protocols.

But absence has a cost. And I almost paid it.

Skin Won

So I started talking about it. To anyone who would listen.

And I started gathering other women in similar situations. Women coming from big numbers. Women unhappy and uncertain about when to stop. Women whose scales had stopped moving but whose excess skin nobody was naming.

We got on Marco Polo.

The first group, we named Skin Won. W-O-N.

Most of the group names that followed were just as delightful. Skin, comma, Too. T-O-O. Triple Skin. Four Bits. We had ten groups.

And we shared videos. Of our Angel Wings. Our Waterfalls. Our Sharpei's eyebrows.

We started to see what deflated skin in OTHER women looked like. So powerful. So cathartic. Such a blessing.

We weren't alone anymore. We had accomplished something incredible. We were sharing it with each other. Loosening the shame. Releasing it.

We became Skin Sisters.

The Formula

And then we started looking at the logic of it. The math.

Because if our bodies were carrying excess skin, and the scales and BMI calculators and DEXA scans weren't accounting for it — could we account for it? Could we figure out a real number for our bodies?

So we came up with a formula. Based on the differentiation between what our bodies would have been had we not added all that excess weight. Versus how long we had held onto it.

A loose formula. Pun intended.

And boy howdy was it accurate.

My friend Cindy Rhineman Marsch and I worked on this together. We did the math. We refined it. Tested it on our own bodies. Validated it on dozens of others.

And then the Skin Sisters started sending me their DEXA scans. Hundreds of them. So we could triangulate what the formula said. Versus what the scans said. Versus what their bodies were actually doing.

Across ten Marco Polo groups. More than one hundred and fifty women. None of this was published. None of it was credentialed. None of it was endorsed by any program or doctor.

Because at the time we were anomalies. The science hadn't gotten to us. We weren't being suppressed. We just weren't on the radar.

So we did what people in our position have always done. We figured it out among ourselves.

It was just true.

Why Now

For years, the Skin Sisters and I kept working in those Marco Polo groups. Comparing notes. Validating the formula. Refining it against new bodies. New DEXA scans. New stories.

And life moved on. The original groups ran their course.

I went on to build new community spaces. The Magic Membership. I wrote a book — Thinking Outside the Box. I created a program called the Advanced Recovery Project. The work in front of you now.

And in all those years, I kept watching.

I watched the published science not catch up. I watched DEXA scanners still misread excess skin as lean tissue. I watched doctors still tell women to add ten pounds and exercise more.

I watched women dive far too low. I watched women lose far more body fat than was safe, chasing numbers that were never theirs. I watched women regain everything they'd released — because they couldn't tolerate the bodies that were trying to keep them alive. Or they couldn't tolerate the hunger. Or they got so disappointed at not reaching that magic number.

And I kept saying—someday. Someday I will teach this publicly. Someday I will sit down with everything I've learned and put it on a stage.

It's been far too long. I've seen far too many women trying to push past their floor. It's time to share all of this.

Which Brings Us to June 3rd

On Wednesday, June 3rd at 4pm Pacific, I'm running a live workshop. Ninety minutes.

It's called Breaking the Spell of the Scale.

In those ninety minutes, I'm going to walk you through what the Skin Sisters and I figured out together.

I'm going to give you a simple formula — one you can do on a piece of paper with your own numbers in about ten minutes — that gives you a real physiological floor for your body. The body you actually have. Not the body the chart says you should have.

And I'm going to walk you through why the tools you've been measured by have been leaving women like us behind. The scale. BMI. DEXA scans. Health apps. Why none of them were built for the bodies we live in. And why the answer was never going to come from any of them — it was going to come from doing the math ourselves.

We'll also cover the architecture under your excess skin. The interstitium — the body-wide system science just officially confirmed exists. The brain science of why arriving at any number wouldn't have given you what you were chasing. And the maintenance reality nobody is talking about yet.

You will walk out with a real number for the body you actually have.

And you will walk out knowing what to do with the scale. How to use it in a healthy way. Releasing that pipe dream goal weight that was never your number to begin with.

With honor and care for your dear heart.

We have enough hits against us. We don't also need to be reaching for an impossible dream number that can't exist in reality.

If You're Reading This

If you have lived in a body that doesn't fit any chart. A body that did the work and still carries the evidence. I want you in the room with us on June 3rd.

If you have been told to add ten pounds and exercise more. If you have hidden in three-quarter sleeves and capris. If you have gone to a DEXA scan hoping for an answer and gotten a verdict instead. If you have looked in a mirror after releasing significant weight and wondered if your body has become unreadable.

I see you. I have been you. And the Skin Sisters have been you.

And I want to say one more thing before I tell you about the workshop.

The body you carry isn't evidence of failure. It's evidence of every legitimate reason you ate.

You ate to keep your kids safe. You ate to stay sane in marriages that asked too much. You ate to survive grief. You ate to manage the unmanageable. You ate because food was the one thing that worked when nothing else did.

Every one of those reasons was legitimate. Your body did exactly what bodies do when we ask them to absorb what we can't otherwise carry.

So when you look at your Angel Wings, your Waterfalls, your Sharpei's eyebrows — you're not looking at failure. You're looking at the receipts for everything you carried that nobody else could see.

They are badges of honor. Earned.

The Workshop

This workshop is the work we did together. Finally taught publicly.

It's twenty-two dollars. Free for Magic Membership and ARP members. And if you want to bring a guest, use the code SKINSISTER at checkout for fifty percent off.

And when you register, you'll also receive a deep-dive research paper I've been working on. It covers everything in the workshop in much more detail — the body fat science, the architecture under the skin, how to actually care for your folds and skin so they don't become problems, the medical advocacy scripts, and references for everything I teach. The workshop gives you the framework. The paper gives you the depth.

Come find your real number.

Come do the math with women who get it.

Come carry what you've been carrying with people who know what the carrying has been like.

Register here: https://www.transformwithsonja.com/breaking-the-spell

You were never broken. You were biological.

With love and light,

Sonja