It’s a ritual when you’re a Weight Watchers member: the weekly weigh in. You stand on a scale and an employee records your weight in your little booklet, and that one little action can make or break your day, if not your whole week.
It’s funny how much importance we attach to that number. I’ve spent years trying to distance my self-worth from the number on the scale, but the reality is that it’s the simplest and most accurate way to judge a weight-loss effort whether that effort is being undertaken for health, vanity, sanity, or some combination of the three.
Last week I was up a fraction of a pound. Really, hardly a gain at all—but not a loss. And while I rationalized it, tried to identify what I could do differently, and told myself it wasn’t a big deal, it colored how I felt for the rest of the day.
Today, I was down 2.6 pounds and it’s like those pounds were literally lifted from my shoulders. It’s validation. It’s success. It’s a heady feeling. And yet, I think it’s one I need to be wary of as much as its opposite.
The truth is that negative numbers are what I want to see each week, for health reasons and emotional ones, but I don’t want to get too tied up in basing my feelings on the numbers on that scale. They’re just numbers. And if I feel like I’ve had a good week, then they don’t really mean a thing.
Print this post out and put it where you can read it again and again – especially that last paragraph. xxxx
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