01/02/2021
I used to weigh myself every morning. Some days I'd weigh myself another time or two later in the day. I had picked an arbitrary number as my goal weight and I wasn't happy if I wasn't there. I'd diet, lose weight, hit that goal, stop dieting, gain weight. I'd get determined and come up with a new plan to lose the weight and repeat the cycle.
The number on the scale would set the tone for my day. If it was lower, I was happy. If it was higher, I was frustrated.
If I'd been "good" with my eating and it went up, I would say "screw it" and eat some crap because it hadn't made a difference that I'd been "good" anyway.
I was obsessed. I spent so much time thinking about my weight.
Then two years ago, as I was about to graduate from the Nutritional Therapy Practitioner program, I did a thing.
I threw away my scale.
It was one of the most freeing things that I have ever done for myself.
That one action freed up so much mental space for me to focus on other things in my life. Thinking about my weight was such a huge distraction. It took me going through the NTP program and learning how amazingly our bodies communicate with us to see that by obsessing with the scale, I was focusing on one very small indicator of health to the point that I was ignoring all of the other things that my body was trying to tell me.
Without the distraction of the scale, I could acknowledge which foods made me feel good and which made me feel crappy. Not surprisingly, real whole foods made me feel good. Processed, chemical laden food made me feel crappy. Eating plenty of healthy fats made me feel energized. Eating sugar, bread, pasta, and other high carb foods made me feel tired, anxious and crabby. Without the pressure of my daily weigh in, I was freed to choose the foods that made me feel good not because I was punishing myself but because I was nourishing my body.
And the beautiful irony of it? The foods that make me feel my best enabled me to maintain a stable, healthy weight.
For the past two years, I have been about the same size. When I've been under a lot of stress, I know my weight went up. My pants fit more snuggly. (I mean really ladies, we know if our weight goes up even without a scale to tell us!) When stress levels went down, so would my weight. Seeing this taught me to love my body even when my weight fluctuated up, because I knew that it didn't feel safe and was trying to protect and preserve me (which is what it's doing when stress hormones are high and it's storing fuel as body fat in case you might need it).
The weight that is easy to maintain is my body's happy weight. It settles into this weight without effort. I've had to embrace the fact that it is not as low as what my arbitrary goal weight had been. I know this because I had to diet hard and be super controlling and restrictive with my eating to get to 118lbs to fit into my size 2 jeans. It took me a few months of living scale-free to realize that my body did not want to be a size 2. It was another freeing moment when I acknowledged this and donated all of the clothes that I had been feeling bad about not being able to comfortably fit into.
I don't think that everyone needs to throw away their scale, but if you are feeling like a slave to it, I'd highly recommend it. Not ready to go that far? Ask someone to hide it from you for a month or two. You might never want it back!
Actively trying to lose weight? I still recommend ditching the scale, or going to once a month weigh ins. I promise, your body can still lose weight even if you don't know what your current weight is each day! And since stress prevents us from losing weight and daily weigh ins are stressful, your weight lose might even accelerate!
Wishing you a very blessed 2021 ❤️
