You Should Probably Weigh Yourself Regularly
Shielding Yourself From The Truth Doesn't Solve Your Problem
The concept of body weight, essentially the Earth’s gravitational pull on your body, has become controversial in recent years. It shouldn’t be. An inability to confront the naked truth has far-reaching negative effects, especially as it pertains to your health, regardless of the reasoning behind it.
Why I Think People Should Track Their Weight
Weighing yourself is one of the best ways to know if you’ve picked up bad dietary or activity habits. Maybe you’ve started eating out more, snacking, eating more dessert, drinking more alcohol, skipping the gym more often, or not going for walks. Or maybe it’s some combination of these.
It is okay that these things have happened. No one should reasonably expect to weigh the same throughout every season. I, for instance, have fluffy and firm seasons depending on the likelihood of having my shirt off. But regular weighing can keep things from going off the rails.
I generally recommend weighing yourself monthly at a minimum. A month is long enough to reflect change but not so long that any weight gained will be difficult to get off. Having said that, the more frequent the weigh-ins, the better idea you’ll have of true change.
Many fitness and nutrition professionals believe that the focus of health should remain on the habits themselves, and they’ll often recommend more qualitative metrics instead of quantitative measures like body weight. I can respect that and agree with focusing on process-oriented changes over outcome-oriented ones.
But why not both? It doesn’t need to be an either-or thing where we shun potentially helpful feedback because it’s not unequivocally necessary. After all, if you don’t know what you’re doing is working, you won’t know if you need to change anything.
Our obesogenic environment, replete with hyper-palatable, calorie-dense foods, high amounts of stress, and lack of sleep, makes it significantly more difficult to manage our weight. As the saying goes, “modern problems require modern solutions.” If a simple act done relatively infrequently is enough to keep you on track, wouldn’t you say it’s worth it?
Why People Are Afraid Of The Scale
I’ve met many people who were afraid to weigh themselves. I try to be sympathetic to negative associations, but many people lean on their emotions as a crutch to avoid doing necessary or difficult things. If you have a problem, and climbing weight is a problem, you don’t solve it by ignoring it.
Being a competent adult is all about responsibility, and managing your weight is one such responsibility. If you can successfully manage your weight without weighing yourself, great! But if you can’t and want to be healthy, your emotional response to an arbitrary number is not a valid reason to stick your head in the sand.
You can admit that you don’t love the implication of the weight on the scale while also understanding that weighing yourself is necessary to preserve your health.
Overcoming Scale Fear
If weighing yourself is important feedback for managing your body weight, but we have negative associations with the scale, how can we fix this?
Pretend you are a researcher collecting data. By taking an objective view of your weight—as if you were a scientist collecting data in an experiment—you can keep it at arm’s length where it’s less likely to cause you distress.
Act as if you are collecting this information for a friend. We get emotionally invested in our weight, but similar to point 1, we can view the numbers more dispassionately by pretending we are collecting this information for someone else.
Weigh yourself frequently enough to see a trend but not so frequently that daily fluctuations drive you crazy. Although more numbers may give you a more accurate picture, the ups and downs of daily weigh-ins can drive some people insane. The conditions for your weigh-ins must be consistent: same day, same clothes (or lack thereof), and the same part of the day. But weigh yourself only as frequently as you feel comfortable to stave off negative emotions.
Stop Self-Judgment
Marcus Aurelius, in his book Meditations, said:
External things are not the problem. It’s your assessment of them. Which you can erase right now.
You must learn to dissociate negative feelings and emotions with a number that says nothing of your worth. It’s not your responsibility to make judgments about the number that you see. Your job is to admit that it’s there and, if you wish it to be different, to take the necessary steps to change it.