Weighing Yourself Down

At the beginning of my health journey, I didn’t own a scale.
I had a rough idea what I weighed, a pile of clothes that were too tight, and a mirror.
I certainly wasn’t opposed to weighing myself whenever I had the opportunity, but there were perks to having limited opportunities.

5 Perks to Staying off the Scales

1. You will free up the mental space to think about your relationship with food.
   If you’re weighing yourself every day, you tend to concentrate on how a meal is going to impact your morning weight rather than impact your sleep, your mood, your energy, or even your hunger! Being preoccupied with how your food decisions affect your weight blocks your ability to listen to your body.
   
2. You will be less frustrated by natural fluctuations in weight.
   There are going to be times that your weight will be up and it has nothing to do with what you ate or didn’t eat. Weight naturally fluctuates with hormones and stress and time of day, so anxiously watching your weight bounce around can be an unnecessary emotional roller coaster.
   
3. You can focus on improving your health-promoting behaviors rather than losing weight.
   In James Clear’s book Atomic Habits, he writes, “The dark side of tracking a particular behavior is that we become driven by the number rather than the purpose behind it.” So what’s the purpose of losing weight? If you want to lose weight so that you can sleep better, play tag with your kids, reduce your medications, think more clearly, and feel better about yourself, then transitioning to a healthier lifestyle is going to serve you better than yo-yo dieting.
   
4. You will be more sensitive to non-scale victories.
   When you’re fixated on measuring your progress in pounds, you lose sight of the multitude of benefits of improved health. You many experience improved digestion, confidence, energy, libido, and mobility. You might feel comfortable in your clothes for the first time. You may be able to do things you didn’t think possible. You might experience less pain or inflammation. Don’t miss out on these big wins because you’re obsessed with numbers.
   
5. You will be less discouraged by naturally slow and stagnant weight-loss.
   The scale rewards restrictive dieting. Any fad diet that makes it exciting to step on the scale is probably unhealthy and/or difficult to sustain. Slow changes allow your body, your taste preferences, and your metabolism to adjust. I lost a pound per month on average when I started transitioning to a plant-based diet, and now I go through long periods of maintenance while I wrestle with my sugar addiction and overeating habit. That’s painfully slow weight-loss compared to dieting, and that could get discouraging if you’re in a hurry.

Why do we compulsively weigh ourselves?

A few years into my health journey, my sister bought a scale and left it at my place so that she could monitor her weight while she was staying with me. This scale slowly crept its way into my bedroom and my lifestyle. Now I weigh myself at least once per week (sometimes every day) just like the majority of people registered with the National Weight Control Registry who’ve successfully maintained their weight loss long term. We are literally “watching our weight.” Why?

Well, one reason is the same reason my sister needed to buy that scale in the first place – damage control! Damage control is when you indulge in processed foods and closely monitor your weight to see if you’re getting away with it. I do this on and off. It’s like I’m asking my scale permission to eat more goat gouda and red velvet cupcakes, and as long as I come in under some arbitrary number, it says “yes.”

The other reason is that I’m still eager to lose weight. When I experiment with my diet and lifestyle, I sometimes restrict a little too much because I want immediate results and those brain pathways forged by diet culture light up. Deprivation is followed by a cycle of craving, binging, another last supper, and desperation to lose weight again. All of these keep me coming back to the scale and not actually getting anywhere.

I’ve been losing and gaining the same 10 pounds for over a year. I’m stuck. I want to embrace Intuitive Eating a bit more, but my scales keep interfering, telling me that I could eat more or shouldn’t eat more. I want to focus on my health-promoting behaviors and my relationship with food and my body, but my scales keep tempting me to restrict and binge. So, I’m going to do an experiment.

I’m going to push my scales aside for the season!

When it comes to my health, I have a lot of competing voices swirling in my head, and I’m going to silence one of them for a few months. I want to hear the other voices: my body, my clothes, my conscience. So I moved the scales to my husband’s side of the bed. It’s already been a few weeks since I stepped on them, and I am starting to notice a shift in my attention. I can feel a growing desire to be stronger, to exercise more, to drink less coffee. I have the mental space to think about other aspects of my health. Other voices are being heard.

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