Making a target weight one’s endpoint is a way of staying stuck in the thrall of the numerical, which for most people is a centrally life-sapping part of their experience of having anorexia. Using a target weight is a misguided attempt to strengthen the therapeutic alliance and/or reassure the individual who is recovering. But someone with anorexia isn’t going to take long to see through someone else’s attempt to “keep the disorder happy” by setting a relatively low target weight. If they were set fantastically high, target weights would still be committing some of the simpler, more logic-related errors—like fortune-telling someone else’s future. In the next part of this post, I’ll finish my roundup of reasons against target weights, moving onto institutional reasons why they survive when they shouldn’t.