79.5kg (12 and a half stone) for me. My starting weight was 160kg BMI 59.5 in the last week of February 2022.
It took me from March 2022 to the end of February this year to escape obesity and finally reach the upper end of the overweight category.
If I make it down to BMI 23 I will have lost a bit more than 61% of my original starting weight. At the same time I will also have managed to celebrate losing 10% of my body weight on 9 separate occasions.
I started out thinking I'd hold a celebration once I got down to being merely "obese" instead of morbidly obese. Until I did the maths and realised there were 66kg (10.4 stone) between me and BMI 35 (I have diabetes and am only 164cm tall, so anything above 94kg is classed as morbid obesity). That came as a nasty shock. I was stunned and felt like giving up. The prospect of slogging away unrewarded for so long felt grim and hopeless.
After realising just how long and bleak the road ahead appeared I came up with a cunning plan of breaking it up into more manageable segments by holding a private celebration each time I lost 10% of my weight. Since I was making up my own rules I gave myself special dispensation to cheat by resetting the starting weight each time I got down to a new next 10% milestone.
That meant I needed to shed 16kg to reach the first celebration, down from 160kg, (but still a darned sight less daunting than 66kgs) then after resetting the starting clock I only needed to lose 14.4kg to hit the second 10% at 144kg, after that it was 13kg and so on, with the number of kilos between milestones decreasing each time.
If I make it down to BMI 23 the last 10% will only be 8.9kg. Which seems fair and reasonable, considering that decreasing body mass makes the final kilos increasingly hard to shift.
I'm rather fond of holding little festive occasions, so I also celebrated when I reached 113.5kg = the half way point between my starting weight of 160kg and the highest normal weight for my height 67kg, and then another little celebration when I broke the 100kg barrier.
I weigh myself every four weeks, and chart my progress on a spreadsheet, ticking off the milestones along the way. Often the celebrations are just a mental pat on the back, but every now and again I get super festive and shove a cake firework into a fruit. Apart from that I concentrate on eating all the stuff that improves my gut microbiome, dodging the UPF stuff that would harm it, and try not to give too much headroom to thoughts of weight.
I hope I might reach my goal weight by spring next year at somewhere between BMI 23 and 24.9. In which case it will have taken 4 years. Then I'll work on staying the same weight, so that I can finally restock my wardrobe with quality items.
One big plus is that I won't have to worry about maintenance because as a diabetic I'll get 5mg of Mounjaro from the NHS. I'm really hoping I'll reach a stage where I'll be able to drag myself to the gym and their machines will strengthen my useless legs that are still treacherous collapsing bastards, despite my having shed that other woman that I'd been schlepping around with me for 40 years.