Did you know that some women lead perfectly happy and healthy lives without ever stepping on a scale? There are women out there who don’t even know what they weigh! If you are one of those women, as I’m sure some of you are, then you will spend the rest of this post shaking your head in bewilderment. See, I am not one of those women. I have had a long tumultuous history with that little number, my weight. About a year ago I was weighing myself multiple times a day and driving myself crazy with the implications, ie. “That was the biggest poop ever! How did I not lose any weight?!” I was even one of those nuts who would waste precious alone time in the bathroom recalibrating, checking, and even relocating my scale in case the gravity was more favorable on the other end of the room. (Note: this doesn’t work. You’d have to relocate to the moon to see a noticeable effect on your weight.)
I am not proud to say how much that number meant to me. A high number spelled doom for the rest of the day. A low number was good but made me panicky to figure out what I had done to get it. I obsessed about that number, worried about that number, and finally broke down and had one of those gut-wrenching cries that leaves you so puffy eyed that you’re embarrassed to go in public, all over that stupid number. As I sobbed to my husband I had a realization: I’ve got to get over this number.
My therapist and I came to an agreement: the end goal, which seemed too scary to approach at the moment, was to give up my dependence on the scale. In the meantime, however, I would limit myself to just one weigh-in a day. Unlike some of the things my therapist has asked me to do, I surprised myself by being able to do this one and stick to it right away. It was a relief, actually, to not be such a slave to my scale. But I still had my once-a-day ritual to keep the anxiety at bay. Because after all, everyone knows that one of the proven ways to keep from regaining lost weight is to weigh yourself every day. The number still drove me crazy but it was a more controlled crazy.
And then, like magic, my scale disappeared. In a house with three tiny tots things are often relocated on irrational whims. (Salad dressing in the piano bench? Crayons in the heater vent? My eyelash curler in the toilet? Why not!) This time, however, I strongly suspected my husband. Despite several days of whining, cajoling and begging none of the males in my house ‘fessed up nor relinquished my scale.
Fine, I thought angrily as the anxiety mounted – there was Halloween candy in the house, people! – I’ll show them. I’ll just get another scale. And so, being a cheapskate, to the thrift store I headed. Long story short: the same place that sells lead paint (right next to the baby spoons) and 8-track players and half of a sandwich maker, doesn’t sell scales.
“It’s a sign,” my husband commented dryly. “The universe doesn’t care how much you weigh.” The thought was overwhelming. I just wasn’t ready yet!
I wish I could say that I’ve totally kicked my scale addiction but being pregnant, if anything, has only made me more attached to that magic number. Knowing that my doctor is going to weigh me every time I come in and that that number can be affected by what time of day it is, what I had for lunch and my clothing, it seems even more important to weigh myself at home so I know the “real” number. What’s your stance on the scale? If you have managed to kick your addiction, how did you do it?
I don't know if it's good, bad, or indifferent, but I approximately know my weight without using a scale. Kind of a Carnac the Magnificent for weight 🙂
I have not weighed myself in a LONG time but I think I am on the other end of this spectrum. I am afraid to see what the scale says. I am the healthiest I have ever been (emotionally and mentally and physically) but am scared to know what the scale says. I don't even look when the gyn doctor weighs me each year. I don't want to go back to the days where I felt I had to poop before weighing(yea i did it too). So I do not rely on the scale at all(and think daily weighing *may* help one keep weight off if they have positive body image…it didn't help me…reading those kind of articles makes me cringe now since I sought for those kinds to rationalize how i was bahaving!!) I just rely on how my clothes fit and how I feel. I know when I have eaten too much of something that makes me bloated or blah.
So I don't know if I call myself a "successful-scale-habit-kicker"…since I am actually really scared to get on it:) But really…what is it going to hurt. I am not going on a diet…i just don't want to revisit those feelings…sounds like I need to journal some feelings:) ha! great post!
How did I do it? I had a daughter who grew up to be a teenager who now probably outweighs me. Realizing she was beginning to worry about "that number", I stopped weighing myself so I could honestly tell her (when she asked), "Honey, I have no idea how much I weigh. And really, does it matter?"
So far, so good. But we have a lot of teenage years to go. I don't think I'll know what I weigh for a looong time. Which is actually very freeing!
I have a good way of knowing when something is a problem for me- I am ashamed to talk about it. So since I can say "I weigh myself every day" I don't think that my doing so is a problem. I also weighed myself every day when I had an eating disorder, but I made a big secret of it. It was clearly problematic then, but now it's more of a way for me to know whether or not I can have dessert on any given night. 🙂
I am curious about how I will react to the scale when I am pregnant. I have several friends who explicitly asked their doctors and nurses not to tell them the number, just let them know if they were within a healthy range because they didn't want to know.
I kind of think (and certainly hope) that I will be the kind of person to celebrate the weight gain and flaunt my bump, but I worry that I won't know how to deal with the changes in my body. (I hate my boobs, especially when they get bigger, which they seem to do every time I say I hate my boobs. So my history is that I am not the biggest fan of womanly changes.)
I recently blogged about my own scale addiction and gave up the scale for a week…it was the most stressful week, EVER. I am limiting myself to one weigh-in per day. I won't lie…it's hard, and by the end of the week, I was all but starving myself because I was afraid of getting a "bad number." I have spent plenty of time crying over the number on the scale…especially when I didn't know what it was. I think weighing every day and KNOWING where I'm at keeps me on track and helps me make better decisions during the day.
…Sorry, my comment is a little "all over the place." I was doing 8th grade English homework and writing at the same time. LOL
I do weigh once a day but use my clothes as an indicator too. I occasionally do this test where I weigh myself morning, noon & night to prove to myself how much my weight fluctuates in a day and it does anywhere from 2.5 to 3.5 pounds in a day depending on how much fluid I drank & if I ate right before the weigh & so forth. It is just to prove to myself that it is what it is & I am one that has big weight changes during the day with food/water drinking. My morn weigh in & how the clothes fit is what counts. This test thing I do rarely but it does show how much weight can fluctuate even if you are doing everything right.
As for the stars, I rarely believe their stories about what they do to keep in shape unless it really rings true & most of the time it does not.
This post is so me. I weigh myself every day and it is amazing how those three numbers can play with my emotions. The worst is when you somehow lose 1 pound and then the next day gain 2, how is that possible! In my head I know I shouldn't get so upset about those (probably normal) fluctuations. But I do. Lately I have been in complete freakout mode as I sprained my wrist (goodbye weightlifting and plank type work) then got sick (no workouts at all) and the numbers have gone up, up, up.
I wish I could look at the numbers objectively, or stop looking. But I haven't been able to do either yet. I am a total scale junkie.
When I was leaner a couple of years ago I enjoyed the daily weigh-in b/c it was almost always good. Now I'm about 4-7 pounds heavier and each pound is a "dog" pound, like "dog" years. Each one feels like 7. So I actually cut back to about once a week. I still only weigh in on days that I know I don't plan to work out. Otherwise I'll be too bummed to train if the number is 'bad'.
Also I have one of those scales that has the % of fat also. It really pisses me off if I lost a pound or two (yay) then gained fat percentage (boo).
I would love to see all of the numbers in my life have less meaning…calories, weight, heart-rate data, etc. One day maybe 🙂
Hmmm…I just ordered a scale online because the smallest I've ever been is when I had a scale handy. But I also only ate one meal a day, which was usually just a couple crackers with peanut butter, and swimming and taking a spin class every day. When I lost access to said scale (because I moved away to school), I became unhealthily lazy. Then I started to eat healthy and exercise. So now I'm hoping the scale can be a measure of improvement, but I'm somewhat concerned that I'll go back to my old ways. Honestly, a bit of me wants to, since then I'd be much much tinier, without as much work. Sigh. I'm assuming this will work out for the best. Hopefully?
i weigh myself every day only when i know i'm being active and eating healthily. when i'm overeating and not exercising i lose the confidence to weigh myself and find myself 20lbs heavier 6 months later. for me, whether or not i 'want' to step on the scale in the morning is a good indicator on whether i'm being healthy or not.
the number itself has little impact on me. i'm trying to lose weight but deliberately very slowly as i'm trying to get away with changing my lifestyle in the smallest possible ways. so if i see a 'downward' trend of about half a pound a month, that's about right for me. thankfully i weighed myself obsessively as a teenager and soon learnt that the daily/weekly fluctuations were virtually meaningless and the number itself became less important. mind you, the teenage daily weighing was the only thing i did obsessively, it really had no impact on my moods or how i ate/exercised. i think the lazy/greedy gene runs deep with me.
Amen.
I hate getting weighed at the OB. When I weigh at home, it's naked, first thing in the morning after I've been to the bathroom. At the doctor's, it's fully clothed with shoes on and before I go pee in a cup so I'm usually containing a couple extra pounds of fluid. When they weigh me, I want to scream, "No! I don't really weigh that much!"
If I'm training for a particular race, then I almost never weigh myself. I tend to gain 2-4 pounds when I train really hard, and it drives me nuts if I'm always jumping on the scale. When I'm not in training (but still exercising daily), I tend to weigh myself once a day mostly to ensure I'm not slowly gaining pounds. When I was pregnant, I was crazy about weighing myself. I didn't so much mind gaining weight, I realize that's normal, but being weighed so often at the doctor's office absolutely drives me nuts!
I weigh myself once (or twice max) a week. I tried doing it once per day but the fluctuations were driving me crazy. It's totally impossible to gain or lose a pound or more per day (one pound of fat 1s 3500 calories!!). I weigh myself first thing in the morning after going to the bathroom (I think about the size of my poop and the colour of my pee too), but I also know day-to-day fluctuations are due to how late, how much and how salty I ate last night (total digestion from food to poop takes about 12 hours, and salt retains water), if I woke up several times during the night to drink water, etc.
A weekly weigh-in works well with me, specially when I weigh myself always on the same day of the week, preferably a day I know I usually eat well the day before, so not the morning after take-out day! 🙂 I'm loosing weigh slowly by changing my habits for the long term rather than dieting and restricting myself, so week after week I'm usually losing less than a pound or no change. As long as I stopped gaining it's a win!
I get on the scale daily (in the mroning), but only track my Monday weight as my true weight. I find the daily weigh-ins help me keep my motivation, even if it just means maintaining my weight. I gain weight so easily, that if I happen to see the scale jump 3 lbs in 1 day, I know that the stop at the drive-thru really did hurt me, even if the weight will kind of melt off over the rest of the week. I guess it helps to stop my bad behavior with food before it becomes an out-of-control month-long binge.
I weigh myself at least once a week. Sometimes I will weigh myself daily – but only once a day and always first thing in the morning. I'm not normally much affected by the number I see – I own a mirror, I already know I'm chubby. I hopped on the scale this morning, on a whim, and was pleasantly surprised to see a number (in the direction of low) that I have not seen in quite a while; I know that tomorrow it may bounce up again, but I'm not too upset by that.
I have in the past taken a complete break from the scale a few times. I can't say that it made me any happier. When I did eventually step on the scale again, it was usually to find that that I had gained some pounds which made me really unhappy. So I'm sticking to my regular weigh ins for now.
It's one of those things that is not one-size-fits-all.
At the height of my ED I weighed 5+ times a day. As I recovered I still had to do it everyday and I woudl definitely let it influence my mood. I could see how bad this was for me mentally so I slowly cut back until I was only weighing once per week and continue that to this day. If a weight seems particularly off (high or low) I will weigh again the next day. What really helped me was to give myself a range of what I want to weigh (2 lbs +/- from my goal weight) Even tough 2 lbs is a tiny amount mentally it makes me feel better to have that wiggle room instead of hoping to always see one number. If I go over that 2 lbs that means it is time to cut back for a week, etc.
I love my scale. I can't help it. I weigh myself every day to make sure I am staying on track. And I don't think I could easily give it up. And this is so bad, but the nights that I eat dinner early and light, the next morning I am so happy with my weight. Stupid I know.
I totally agree about skinny not always meaning healthy and I love hearing the lies these celebs tell. I eat what I want and barely work out my A$$. Hopefully we can all start being more realistic, but my scale will always be my friend. 🙂
I do weigh myself every morning (and have done it before and after a BM- in the name of science of course!) because I have had sneaky weight gain before. But I try to be pretty zen about it. Rather than freaking out because it's up or down, I try to figure out why (Chinese food? It truly was a huge BM?) and recognize that as long as I'm not creeping higher over time, I'm okay.
I avoided weighing myself for about two years, preferring to judge my size by how my clothes fit but I managed to gain weight every autumn (as work became more stressful and, thus, I ate more and exercised less). THis year, I'm resolving to weigh myself every Saturday, just to keep myself "real." The truth is, clothes stretch out as you wear them and it's easy to deny that something feels a tiny bit more snug than it did a few weeks earlier, but it's hard to ignore rising numbers, so I DO think weighing yourself occasionally, IF you have a history of genuine weight trouble, can be beneficial and keep you in check. But I would never say weighing in several times a day in beneficial — to me, that is obsessive.
Further — I TOTALLY agree that being skinny does not necessarily mean healthy. Absolutely! I live in New York City and while I prefer to spend my time with people who are not interested in looking like models and starving themselves, I do work in an industry where many clients and colleagues routinely get plastic surgery and avoid food at all costs. These people are skinny, yes, but seeing them in real life (as opposed to on TV or in magazines) I have to say that they do NOT look healthy. They look MISERABLE, in fact, and awful and haggard and unhappy. Maybe they're really delightful people who love life on the inside, but on the outside they do not come across that way. Instead, people who eat regularly, stay active and aren't afraid to not be a size 0 look absolutely radiant by comparison. Really.
I weigh myself almost every morning. I don't obsess about the number, I don't write it down, and I don't weigh myself more than once a day. Using the scale helps me maintain my current weight range.
I weigh myself everyday and have since I started on my journey that has lead to me loosing close to 100lbs. I don't get too obsessed on the number to the point I let it wreck my day. I recognize it can fluctuate a pound or two from day to day and I am ok with that. Now that I am in maintenance getting on everyday is my check of staying in maintenance. When I was very heavy I would never weigh myself nor did I want to. And through my journey when my clean eating would slip up I would avoid the scale. Seeing that makes me keep getting on every day now because it keeps me accountable to my clean eating if that makes any sense.
I get on the scale when I'm feeling bloated, flabby, or gross. And usually find that the number is the same as when I'm not feeling those things. The battery in my scale recently died and I admit to having a minor pang of anxiety. But I still haven't replaced the battery and seem to be doing fine.
I get on the scale when I'm feeling bloated, flabby, or gross. And usually find that the number is the same as when I'm not feeling those things. The battery in my scale recently died and I admit to having a minor pang of anxiety. But I still haven't replaced the battery and seem to be doing fine.
I get on the scale when I'm feeling bloated, flabby, or gross. And usually find that the number is the same as when I'm not feeling those things. The battery in my scale recently died and I admit to having a minor pang of anxiety. But I still haven't replaced the battery and seem to be doing fine.
I weight myself 2-3 times a week. I used to have a scale at home, one of those ones that gives you body fat too (and that calculation was always wrong, according to the body fat meter at the gym). But the batteries ran out and I threw away the scale. So I just weigh myself at the gym now 2-3 times a week. Just to make sure I'm staying on track. I don't worry about a couple pound fluctuation, but when the numbers start to really creep up and my clothes feel tight, then I know I need to take action, even if I think I still look awesome.
I actually prefer weighing myself later in the day because I feel like it's a more real indicator of how much I weigh, since that's what I weigh most of the day.
Also, I don't have any qualms about telling people how much I weigh…usually it's fun to see guy's faces when I tell them, because I seriously don't look like I'd weigh as much as I do. Sometimes they try to argue with me, telling me I couldn't possibly weigh that much. Ha. So I definitely would rather be healthy, look healthy, and happen to have a higher weight on the scale than vice versa.
How to kick the habit: (1) Do not have scales in the house. (2) When you feel the urge, inhale slowly (closing your eyes may help), then exhale slowly. Repeat until your mind wanders, and you are free.
I find that when I don't weigh, I don't lose. So the key for me is to hop on the scale every morning, face the number, and don't let it affect my mood too much. Once I start training for the next half marathon in November though, I'm probably going to limit myself to once a week.
Right now though – I'm avoiding it like the plague. At least until tomorrow. I don't want to know what Vegas did to me just yet, tee hee.
I'm a water weight keeper-onner (is that a word?) so I had to cut back to weighing myself every few weeks once I got down near where I want to be. the going up and down thing daily would depress me. I'd want to give up and snarf down comfort food. Now I find it easier to deal with…if I'm up a pund or two I work on it. If I'm down a pound a two I'm very happy – I wish I could say it would make me do more and keep it off, but hey…I've had a level weight for a few years now.
Maybe that makes it easier to do…
It depends. I vacillate between once a day and once a week. They each make me crazy in their own special ways, so when I start approaching the "danger zone" in either of them, I switch to the other. Right now I'm weighing once a day, about to switch to once a week. 😉
I love your blog; I mainly lurk, but since you're so lovely and loveable I hope my answer helps a bit: I weighed myself all the time. I counted calories all the time. As you know I'm sure this takes up almost all available mental capacity, time and energy. After about eight years I decided no more. I was convinced I'd gain some, but I was willing to accept that. (I'm slim; it would've taken quite some gain to make me "fat". I would've felt fat anyway. But still.) As you've heard before I'm sure, from others who've been there: I didn't gain. That was over ten years ago. I've been pregnant twice, haven't dieted a day, and am still pretty much the same weight, maybe a couple of pounds more. (I do weigh myself now every couple of months.) How did I do it? I got rid of the scales. I forced myself to replace thought about weight and body image and refocus. Maybe most of all: I didn't want to be that person anymore that somewhere, deep inside, bought the notion that "thin" is so important. Thin is just that. Thin. Like a shoe size. Get over it. Also: I feel it enormously important to teach the kids healthy body image. My children learn to listen to their bodies, that a full tummy is a thing to be thankful for, and that everybody (every body) is beautiful.
I think I beat it. Despite how hard I worked out and the changes I saw in my body, the scale made my determination for me. I said that daily weigh in kept me accountable. It kept me miserable. Now I teach 6 Spin classes a week. Before I teach I lift weights or do body weight exercises. Many mornings I do some Yoga when I awaken. Guess what? I finally decided that if the scale can devastate me despite all that activity, I need to give it up. I don't miss it! I finally weighed myself after a month or so and weighed what I always do.
I stay off the scale. That way madness lies.
I loathe our scale – my weight can fluctuate by 5 pounds over a 24 hour period. For me, it's totally unreliable.
I can't have a scale in my house.
I want to weigh what works on my body, and what allows me to dance, go to yoga, run, hike, rollerblade to the best of my ability. And that number? The number which lets me be able to do all that *and* not be shaky from a lack of calories? Is always higher than that old ED voice wants it to be.
So no scale.
If my body is working and able to do what I need it to, I do NOT need another opening for that voice to take over again.
I don't have a scale in the house right now, but weigh at the gym at least every other day. As Karen said, it's a bit too easy to ignore the clothes getting tight, but the numbers are undeniable. I don't freak out over it, and I also retain water, so it bounces in a 3-4 pound range, drops very slowly, but if it goes up, I notice it immediately.
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