Why you should (probably) stop weighing yourself.
The scales: just the mere mention of them is probably something that will fill many of you reading this with a feeling of dread. They are an object that many of us have a love/hate relationship with, or in some cases, just simply a relationship of pure hate. Are they, objectively speaking, bad? Of course not - and for lots of people it’s a good thing to weight themselves regularly and track their weight. It helps them to stay accountable and measure their progress. To these people I say; go ahead, keep at it. However, they’re not the ones I’m writing this blog for, and I’d hazard a guess they’re probably not the ones who are reading it right now, either…
Scale weight is a data point of certain medical importance - our weight is a good indicator of risk when it comes to many chronic illnesses and disease - but is often misused. You see, there is no singular weight that is ‘good’ or ‘healthy’ for any individual. Rather, there is a weight range which will be ‘more healthy’ for each of us to stay within, and this can vary over the course of our lifetimes as our body composition changes, too. While scale weight can be a good way of tracking progress, any progress measurement is only as good as the benefit it has on your life as a whole. If stepping on the scales actually causes you psychological distress, anxiety or other negative effects, then it is not worth persevering with.
So, how do you know if you should probably stop weighing yourself? Well, there’s a few things that would make me suggest looking for other ways to measure your progress than scale weight (which I will come to), but on a simple level, if stepping on the scales only creates negative emotional responses, then I’d definitely recommend putting the scales away for a while. If seeing that number flash up is regularly making you feel bad about yourself, or getting you down, then it’s not a good idea to keep doing it, and subjecting yourself to that.
There will be a group of people reading this who will say, “Well that’s not me, I’m happy to weigh myself so long as the number doesn’t go up…” - well guess what, you need to put that scale away just as much. If you require the number on the scale to go down, or at the very least stay the same, in order to weigh yourself and feel ok doing so, then you do not have a healthy relationship with the scales. And you do not have a healthy relationship with your body weight. Weight loss, weight maintenance and even weight gain are not purely linear processes. Your weight is going to fluctuate up and down over the course of the day, week, month and year. Sometimes you will weigh more, sometimes you will weigh less - and there are countless factors which will have an impact on why your weight is fluctuating so much. So if you are unable to handle the times when your weight does increase, or rationalise in the moment that your weight increasing is not an indictment of you or your actions, then it’s best for you to simply not weigh yourself and put yourself through that distress.
If you are attached to ‘weighing’ a specific number, you also probably shouldn’t be weighing yourself. If you say to yourself, “It’s ok so long as I weigh less than ‘X’.”, then again, you do not have a healthy relationship with the scales. Like I mentioned at the start of this blog, there is no singular weight that anyone must way to be healthy, or in shape. And like I mentioned in the previous paragraph, our weight fluctuates… a lot. So if you are hanging onto a specific number in your head that you need to weigh (or weigh more or less than), then you are really doing yourself a disservice. By focusing so much on a specific number, you lose sight of whether you are actually getting healthier, whether you are actually improving your fitness, whether you are working towards other goals - and often the number you are working towards is completely random, too.
Ok, so ‘random’ might not be the right word, there. There’s almost always some kind of emotional attachment to the number in your head - maybe it’s what you weighed 20 years ago when you feel you were in the best shape of your life. Maybe it’s what you weighed during some of the happiest times of your life, or before kids came along, or maybe it’s the weight you’ve always felt you should weigh, or the weight that will allow you to be happy within yourself. There’s almost always a reason why someone wants to weigh that specific amount… but those reasons are almost always emotional rather than rational. And let me tell you now, if you think that getting to that weight will make you happy, or be ‘enough’ for you: you’re wrong. In my experience, all that will happen when you achieve that goal weight is that you will make that weight your new baseline, and suddenly your expectation will shift to “I can’t weigh more than X” - there will be a momentary sense of achievement, but if you have a poor relationship with the scale and your weight, it will never last.
If you are hoping that weight loss (or weight gain for that matter) in and of itself will make you happy, you are sadly mistaken. And by continuing to put yourself through that cycle, you are just reinforcing and perpetuating those negative feelings and emotions. I don’t have all the answers - I am no expert on mental health or psychology - but I do know that breaking the cycle, and putting the scales away (at least for a while) can be hugely beneficial for individuals struggling with issues such as these.
There are many ways to measure progress the put far less pressure on ourselves. Measurements that are less variable from day to day, and are less rooted in negative emotions and pressure. The fact that so many people struggle with that number on the scales is no coincidence - it comes from generations of being told that we should weigh a certain thing or look a certain way in order to be deemed good, or in order to be happy. It’s not your fault if you do struggle with these thoughts or feelings, but that doesn’t mean you should just allow them to persist. No-one should be defined by the number on the scale, and nor should anyone be controlled by it, either. Put the scales away, stop weighing yourself and find a more positive way to measure your progress, to celebrate your success, or to grade your health.
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