When the Weight of the World is On That Scale

I could honestly write about my journey with weight for a War and Peace length novel….And actually, that would probably be a good title for that novel, since for the longest time it felt like I was at war with the scale and my weight and my body, and then, eventually, I found peace with all of it….but (wo)man, can I empathize with anyone struggling with tying your self worth to what’s on that scale.

The thing about the battle with the scale is that what we’re really fighting with here is a number. A number is just a circumstance. It’s a fact. It has no meaning until we decide it does by having a thought about it. If I tell someone I weigh 130 lbs., one person might think that’s a lot, one may think that’s a perfect number, one may think that’s their ideal weight, one may be envious, someone else may not care one way or another…..The number itself means nothing. Just like the number in my bank account or the number of candles on my birthday cake mean nothing until I have a thought about them.

The problem is, we’re so conditioned to care what the numbers say, and to assign a label to them (good/bad, acceptable/unacceptable, win/loss) that we rarely stop to think about the fact that these numbers are just data. They’re just pieces of information that we can use as we move forward.

For me, those numbers determined my mood, my self worth, my confidence, and my actions for so long that at some point I got so fed up with the whole thing that I got rid of my scale and refused to weigh myself. Immediately when I did this, I felt better. (I had another friend who wrote her ideal weight on a piece of masking tape, put that tape over the number on the scale, and stepped on it every morning….She saw the number she wanted to see every day, and she said it shifted her mood instantly).

The problem, again, was and is never the number - the problem only comes up when we have a thought that that number isn’t OK, or means something about us (“I’m fat….I’ll never lose weight….I hate my body….I’ll never get a date….”). So removing the number from my daily life was one way to help myself feel better.

For a while….

Of course, when we don’t resolve the mindset we have about something, it finds a way to pop up anyway. It’s like plugging a hole in the kitchen wall where a mouse keeps coming in from. You can plug the hole but if there are mice around they will find another way to get in. You have to solve the root problem of having mice in order to actually ensure your kitchen will be rodent-free.

Our thoughts work the same way. If you have a thought about your body being unacceptable as it is/should be different/needs to be smaller, etc etc, that thought won’t go away just by removing the scale (or taking any other action). It may hibernate for a bit….but it will always find a way to sneak back in when you’re not looking. At some point, if you want to change your thinking, you have to change your thinking…..

For me, I ended up hopping back on the scale eventually. I saw a number. It was there. My thought was, “Oh, huh. OK". And then I moved on…It didn’t impact my mood one way or another, when in the past it for sure would have. It was pretty much just a total nothing burger. How did I get from a daily obsession to literally not giving a shit what the scale said? You know what I’m going to say: I did the mindset work. I changed my thoughts.

Here’s how: After breaking the habit of the action of weighing myself every day, I started to focus on other things. The less I was worried about my weight, the more I used that mental space and energy to think, feel and act on other goals I had and things I liked (writing, reading, running, business goals, my relationships, my reality TV shows….). Over time I’d realized I’d gone a few days without thinking about food or weight or worrying about what size jeans I was in. It felt revolutionary - there was a time where I couldn’t imagine NOT thinking of those things on a daily, even hourly basis. And the more I kept focused on other things, the more I actually liked myself too. No, I wasn’t as thin as I wanted to be….but it also started to matter a hell of a lot less to me, because I was actually becoming a version of myself that I liked better in other ways. I was more engaged, interested, and interesting. I had more to talk about. More to do. My brain was going in a million directions and I liked them all. Yes, I still thought about what I looked like. And yes, I had times of wishing I was thinner or looked “better” in a photo. But those thoughts were now just a small percent of the total thoughts in my head…and I was too busy and energized by the rest of my life to dwell. So I went on with my life, my weight being whatever it was.

I’d done enough work on my mindset, learning to detach the number on the scale from who I actually am, that when I eventually did step back on that scale and saw a number, that number felt like it wasn’t even a part of me. It was this outside thing that didn’t have anything to do with me….

Because it actually, finally, didn’t.