I recently read this spectacular piece over on Everyday Paleo. I've known for a long time now that the scale is a deceitful little devil. Your numbers going up could mean that you're gaining fat, but it could just as easily mean that you're leaning out as you put on muscle and lose fat. Body weight fluctuates tremendously over the course of a week or even a day; eating a sodium-heavy meal one day could cause you to "gain" several pounds through water retention. Any method of measurement that produces such skewed results ought to be regarded with a degree of skepticism. I know all these things, have known them on an intellectual level for years. But somehow I never really bought into it fully until reading Jason's piece and seeing with my own eyes the way a scale can lie. Deb, the woman he featured, came into his gym overweight and flabby and is now chiseled and slim. She is clearly strong, healthy and happy with her size. And yet, after a complete transformation of body and attitude, she is at her exact starting weight. Yup, the scale has not budged a pound, despite the fact that she looks like a different person.
This story, these results, that was enough to sway me.
So I threw out my scale. On June 22, 2011, I got rid of the little bastard that has been plaguing me and confusing me for years. This was a mostly symbolic gesture, as there is another scale in my house, but it was a meaningful moment for me because for a long time I have allowed a fairly insignificant number to dictate how I feel about myself and how worthy of respect I view my body to be. After years of obsessing over that number, of panicking when it rose and celebrating when it fell, I freed myself of the tyranny of the scale and from the constant need to track the force of the gravitational pull on my body. I haven't weighed myself in three weeks, and I feel liberated.
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