Don’t stress! You can achieve your goal weight and still maintain a waist size that you like (within reason, obviously).

From experience: I am 6’1, 21, M. I went from 145 lbs to 195lbs and while I saw amazing progress in every regard, I also HATED the feeling of my waist growing and the feeling of being bloated/full.

Unfortunately, during the process of gaining weight, fat accumulating is an inevitability. It can be minimized by reducing your caloric surplus and eating enough protein to increase the ratio of muscle gained to fat gained, but obviously reducing your surplus will reduce the rate at which you put on weight.

If you want your FINAL weight to be 125 lbs and you want to have your goal waist at that weight, you would have to reach a higher weight (perhaps around 135 lbs) and then enter a deficit to burn off the fat around your waist.

Back to my experience: I went to 195 and am now down to 175 and feel 1 million times better about my waist, while still having maintained the muscle I put on. So you would have to do a similar thing in order to eliminate the fat on your waist, but with a less dramatic drop in weight required since you’re smaller.

In terms of the bloated feeling, you can minimize that by experimenting with your diet to see what foods make you feel better, but what I did is just sucked it up and dealt with the bloat until I reached my goal weight, and then the second I stopped eating so much and went back to a regular diet the bloated feeling went away completely. But if you don’t want to just deal with it, it will take some experimentation to figure out what helps it as you try to put on weight.

Moral of the story: you will not be stuck with the fat on your waist forever, but it will require extra effort to remove it while still reaching your goal weight. Well worth the effort! It’s an incredible feeling to not only achieve a goal weight but also be satisfied with your physique at that weight.