A good portion of Americans want to lose weight. I too want to be shapely right up to when I die. I am not that great now and I probably won't get much better. Since high school, long ago, I have been conscious of my weight. As a high school and college wrestler, I had to be under a given weight to wrestle. I was weighed on a balance arm scale under the eye of the referee before the matches began. I was never disqualified for any reason and my weight was always ok.
It surprises me that so many people think of the new year and resolutions together. For many people, a main improvement they think of is weight loss.
In my college, 75% of the students were female. There was no sport of wrestling for them, although there is now getting to be. It turned out that the same small band of males tended to show up for every sport. There were times when our wrestling team didn't have a participant for all the weight classes and the coach would put me in against opponents who weighed more than me. Normally, I was in the third lightest wrestling class and there were 6 classes heavier than mine. I didn't keep records but I certainly didn't win a great portion of my matches. It seems as though I won about half of them. Physical weight is only one variable. The relative heights of the wrestlers matters, too. When the opponent is much taller and has longer arms, that matters. When the opponent is much shorter, that matters. Some wrestlers are built low to the ground and can be very difficult to control. Those are the guys with short, very powerful arms, too. It matters who can move faster and it matters who has faster reflexes and who has more experience and training.
In high school, some of the others on the wrestling team seemed to consider any food they liked as dangerous and weight-gaining. We never had the concept of a gateway drug or food but I doubted the idea that I could eat a five ounce chocolate bar and gain more than 5 oz. My first research paper in college was on nutrition since I wanted to know more about food and weight gain.
It seems that many older people have heard that some authorities advise older people, say 70 and over, to have some extra weight. I have heard that prolonged illness may be less difficult for older people who have a body mass index between 25 and 30.
