Hello, Scale, my nemisis.

I enjoyed my weight loss more before I owned my scale, because I only knew how much weight I was losing twice a month when I would see either my dietitian or one of my other various physicians.  This meant, I couldn't obsess over it at home.

For some reason, at a later time I thought it would be a good idea to get a scale.  I don't even recall why I thought it would be a good idea.  I told myself that I would get one and that ... eh, it wasn't even going to be a big deal.  Once a month, on the first, I'd weigh myself so three times a month I'd have my weight.  Once at home, twice at the doctors.  That's not going overboard in a one month period, I had felt, so I bought myself this scale.

Well, technically, I asked my mother to buy this scale for me because it was expensive.  Scales that are capable of holding someone at my weight are priced significantly higher and fall outside the price range of what was affordable.  So I finally had this shiny new scale, I set it up in my kitchen and used it many times the first day I had it because it was cool!  It was digital and it talked.

Ok, it was cool that it talked for everyone else, I quickly learned.  It was not so cool to hear it talk out my weight.  I was like a cat with it's fur raised hissing at this thing.  Evil.  You would think it would stop me from suddenly becoming obsessed with weighing myself.  It did not.  I suddenly went from only weighing myself once a month to only weighing myself once a week which also lasted about half a day.  I was weighing myself several times a week.  I couldn't keep myself off this thing.

I can say with certainty that owning a scale, for me, was a bad idea.  Already having several weight related issues to deal with (that I'm sure will have future individual posts dedicated to them), I now had to deal with getting on this thing every morning and letting it set the mood for my day.  Would I be happy to see it go down or depressed that it stayed the same or angry all day that it went up?

I spent weeks going through this same thing day after day before I finally took the scale, shoved it in a closet and felt blessedly free from the wretched cycle.  I let it sit there for a while, not a long time, because I couldn't let the scale win.  So after about two weeks I took it out and put it back on the floor and this time I felt more ready to have a relationship with my scale.

I didn't have any kind of great epiphany while it was in the closet.  I had a couple therapy sessions where I cried about it and talked to my therapist and worked on my hatred for it.  I did decide that I wouldn't let the numbers on there be the deciding factor on whether or not I was going to have a good day.  Sometime, I still weigh myself two days in a row and sometimes I don't weigh myself at all for an entire week - and I try to do that more often than not.

To be honest, sometimes I still get mad at the scale, but I choose not to stay mad and I don't let it ruin my entire day.