Why Target Weights Usually Hinder Anorexia Recovery

Key points

Bodyweight targets are a form of disingenuous fortune-telling about an unknowable future.

Target weights encourage precisely the dietary restriction that is central to the illness being treated.

Bodyweight targets ignore the likelihood of temporary bodyweight overshoot.

This post is Part 1 of a series.

The majority of my recovery coaching clients come to me without a story about a bodyweight number given to them by a medical professional. And the stories they tell about those numbers are tales of damage.

Doctors are still dishing out target weights to patients with restrictive eating disorders. They do so sometimes in the form of explicit kg/lb values, sometimes via the detour of body mass index (BMI). Nine years ago, I wrote about the problem of bafflingly low BMI tar