Modern Metabolic Health with Dr. Lindsay Ogle, MD

How to Determine Your Goal Weight

• Lindsay Ogle, MD

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Chasing a number on the scale can feel like progress until it collides with your real life. We unpack a better path: choosing a goal weight that protects your health, fits your routines, and holds up for the long haul. With clear examples and practical guardrails, we show how to move beyond BMI and toward metrics that actually predict metabolic well-being.

We start by demystifying BMI—why it can be useful for trends yet misleading as a target—and explain how factors like age, ethnicity, muscle, bone density, and existing conditions reshape risk. From there, we shift to health-first goals: improving blood pressure, cholesterol, A1C, sleep apnea, energy, and mobility while reducing long-term risks like cardiovascular disease and stroke. You’ll learn why body composition analysis, whether DEXA or a validated bioimpedance scale, offers a truer picture of progress as fat mass decreases and muscle mass holds or grows.

Together, we define “best weight” as the weight you can live well in and maintain with sensible habits—consistent nutrition, resistance training, regular movement, quality sleep—and, when appropriate, long-term medications managed with your clinician. We also draw a clear line between health goals and aesthetic goals, inviting honest reflection about motivation while protecting your well-being from extreme tactics. Expect practical tips to preserve muscle during fat loss, interpret plateaus, and set up follow-up rhythms that keep you on course without obsessing over every fluctuation.

If you’re ready to trade shape shifting for health building, this conversation gives you a roadmap anchored in data and compassion. Subscribe, share with someone who needs a saner approach to weight, and leave a review to help more people find tools for better metabolic health.

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Dr. Lindsay Ogle:

Welcome to the Modern Metabolic Health Podcast with your host, Dr. Lindsay Ogle, a board certified family medicine and obesity medicine physician. Here we learn how we can treat and prevent modern metabolic conditions such as diabetes, PCOS, fatty liver disease, metabolic syndrome, sleep apnea, and more. We focus on optimizing lifestyle while utilizing safe and effective medical treatment. Please remember that while I am a physician, I am not your physician. Everything discussed here is provided as general medical knowledge and not direct medical advice. Please talk to your doctor about what is best for you. How do you determine your goal weight? Do you look at a BMI chart? Do you ask your doctor? Do you take time to reflect what is best for you? Or do you kind of wing it and see where you end up? Today we are going to talk about how to determine what your best goal weight is. My name is Dr. Lindsay Ogle. I'm a board certified family medicine and obesity medicine specialist, and I talk to patients about this every single day. And I'm so excited to share my knowledge and experience with you so you can live better and healthier lives. If you want to be my patient and you live in Missouri, please check out Missouri Metabolic Health.com. Many of my patients ask me what is their goal weight? What would be healthiest for their body? And the truth is, I don't know. Even as an obesity medicine specialist, I do not know what weight is best for you. That is something that we will determine together over time by gathering lots of information along the way. Many people and even a lot of providers look at the BMI chart for this answer. They look what is a healthy BMI for somebody, and they set a goal to be within that range. But the truth is there are a lot of flaws with the BMI system. All that BMI is looking at is your height versus your weight. And it was created based on a very uniform male white population. And so it does not accurately reflect how complex and different we all are as humans. It does not take into account our age or our body composition, so how much our bones or our muscles weigh. It does not take into account our ethnicity or our other health conditions. BMI is helpful because it's easy to calculate and we can watch it over time, but it is not an end-all be-all and it should not be used as a goal or a target. What I really prefer are for health-related goals. Especially if my patients have chronic medical conditions like high blood pressure, high cholesterol, diabetes, obstructive sleep apnea. A wonderful goal is to manage your weight in a way that will help manage those chronic conditions that are often weight-related. So as we are treating someone's excess weight, we're watching their health conditions improve over time. And when we see those improvements, we know we are heading in the right direction and we are improving their health. I am not in the market for what I've heard termed as shape shifting. I do not have a goal for everybody to reach that normal body weight, whether you're looking at the BMI or a pant size. What I'm trying to do is to help somebody who has excess weight that's affecting their health and their life to manage that, reduce that excess weight, and to improve those health conditions, hopefully get off other medications if they are on them and prevent complications down the line like cardiovascular disease, heart attack, and stroke. So my definition of a best weight is the weight that somebody feels their best in, feels comfortable in, they can do the activities that they want to do, and that they can maintain over time. And it may not be easy to maintain over time, it's going to take some effort, so it's going to be maintaining a healthy diet, being physically active on a regular basis, sleeping well. It may include continuing medications long term, but it is very manageable for that person to continue. I would never want somebody to reach a goal weight by using an extreme diet that they have no intention of continuing long term because once you end that diet, the weight is going to come back, and that is not the goal. Our goal is long-term health. These goals are highly individualized. So no by no means does everybody need to weigh 150 pounds to be healthy. For some people, a best weight may be 210 pounds, other people, it may be 180, or somebody who may not be as tall, it could be 120. It varies significantly, and only you and your doctor can help determine what that best weight is for you long term. If you have access to body composition, this is a beautiful time to use a body composition analysis. This could be a DEXA scan or it could be a body impedance scale. A common brand is in body, and I will link those below. Watching your body composition over time can be much more helpful than watching your weight over time. Because in an ideal world, in your health journey, you are losing excess body fat and gaining or maintaining muscle mass. And especially if you're gaining muscle mass, you are going to be gaining weight. And if you're gaining muscle mass and losing body fat, then the weight may not change on the scale, but you are becoming much more metabolically healthy. There is also a major difference between health-related goals and aesthetic goals. Sometimes my patients reach a healthy weight for them, and they have no related health conditions or their chronic health conditions are managed pretty easily at their current weight, but they still have goals to fit in a certain pair of jeans or be a certain body size, and there's nothing inherently wrong with that. You just have to reflect and know if that is coming from a place of love or if you have that goal because somebody told you that you need to reach that certain weight or size. Regular follow-up is also extremely important here. Connecting with your provider long term will help you make sure that you're staying on track to maintain your health goals. Thank you for listening and learning how you can improve your metabolic health in this modern world. If you found this information helpful, please share with a friend, family member, or colleague. We need to do all we can to combat the dangerous misinformation that is out there. Please subscribe and write a review. This will help others find the podcast so they may also improve their metabolic health. I look forward to our conversation next week.