Until February 20, 2015, I thought the bathroom scale was my enemy. From the time I was a child, the scale was intimidating. Early in my childhood, I remember getting on the scale at the doctor’s office, and then the doctor giving me a list of foods I should and shouldn’t eat. Later, in third grade, everyone in the class had to get weighed as a part of a class project. I was one of the heaviest kids, and I felt humiliated.
In middle school, we had to go to a health fair in the gymnasium, and somehow or other I wound up being weighed publicly, again. I don’t remember the number, but I remember crying about it. One teacher who saw my tears guided me back to her office and consoled me. I wasn’t fat. Just a little fluffy. I wished I could just melt into the floor, never to return to school again. That was probably the year I received the nickname OSL (oversized load). Middle school was not fun. I digress.
Throughout my teenage years, I was on various diets, diet pills, and exercise programs. Weighing was always a terrible experience, unless I was losing weight. Then it was fine. Not fun, of course, but fine. I would weigh consistently while I was on a plan. As soon as I hit my goal weight, or quit my diet, I quit weighing.
To my mind, that’s just what you did. Why would anyone submit to the torture of weighing when they weren’t trying to lose weight? After I had my third child, I decided I didn’t want to be a slave to the scale any more. Instead, I was going to live my life and be free of it. Thus, I promptly stuck my head in the sand for a couple of years, until I got tagged in some Facebook photos. When I saw them, I did not recognize myself. I vowed I was going to get the weight off. But this time, I’d do it without weighing.
I spent the next year measuring myself with a tape measure. Each week, I’d pull the tape a little tighter, breathe in a little more, measure a little higher up or a little lower down. I did whatever I could do to get the measurements to move down over time, although in reality, not much changed.
In February 2015, I finally joined a gym. After years of avoiding the scale, not knowing where I was with my weight, I decided it was time to face reality. I told myself I’d probably see 175 or 180. 185 at the absolute most. My heart was pounding out of my chest and felt sick to my stomach as I climbed on the scale in the deserted locker room. 222 was the number that was staring back at me. Although nothing had changed in reality, the journey before me was now much longer than I thought it was going to be.
That moment gave me complete clarity. Never did I ever want to be there again, so far off in my self-perception. I knew how I could prevent it from ever happening again. From that day forward, I would weigh myself every day. And I have. The only exception is if I’m on vacation and there’s no scale to be found.
I changed how I thought about the scale. The scale was my new accountability partner. He has one job: to tell me exactly what I weigh. Without fail, he gives it to me straight and to the point each morning, in big red numbers. Even when I don’t want to see it. Especially when I don’t want to see it.
It hasn’t been smooth sailing. At first, weighing myself every day was frustrating. My weight would be up a pound, down a pound, and then back up two pounds. My emotions were all over the place. I analyzed my eating to see why the numbers were doing what they were doing, but it seemed like there was no rhyme or reason. Sometimes my eating was spot on, and my weight was up. Other times I had overeaten, but my weight was down.
The problem wasn’t the scale. The problem was that I was paying attention to the wrong thing. You can’t learn much from the single day weights. Your daily weights fluctuate. And because they fluctuate, you can’t understand much of what’s going on by only looking at them. The key, I learned, was to keep weighing every day, but then pay attention to the 7-day average. The way you do this is you weigh daily, and then add up the past 7 days of weight, and then divide by 7. That’s your 7-day average weight. I have a spreadsheet that will keep track of your 7-day average for you, or you can search for apps that will do the same thing. Averaging weights helps a lot. It smooths things out. You see trends and the bigger picture.
I had to learn that even the 7-day average would fluctuate a little. My weight would fluctuate with my cycle, usually trending up by a few pounds during my period, and then back down as it ended. I learned the way to tell whether I was losing weight successfully was to watch what my 7-day average did over several weeks of time.
I can’t tell you how many times in 2016 I would panic, thinking I had stopped losing weight for whatever reason. But when I sat myself down with my spreadsheet, I would simply look at that day’s 7-day average, and then look back 6 weeks ago, and check what my 7-day average was back then. I would see that I was losing about a pound a week, and I would continue to work my plan. It kept me on track, and that year I lost about 50 pounds.
Weighing daily is something I continue to do in maintenance. I do it because it’s a way to keep holding myself accountable. It’s not an obsession, but a healthy habit that helps me keep my weight in a healthy range. It’s all too easy to let it slide, put the weight back on, and not even realize it. That is, until someone snaps a photo of you and then tags you on Facebook.