I recently had an exciting run-in with the scale in my bathroom.
I've weighed roughly 190 pounds for the last year or two so one can imagine my surprise when the little blue screen on the scale read 208.6 lbs (a weight gain of 18.6 pounds for anyone unwilling to do the math on summer break). I was pretty flabbergasted at what I saw so I stepped off of the scale and then back on same weight, no mistake.
I must admit that I was by no means devastated by the weight gain as I attributed it hopefully to working out and muscle growth (because I lift, bro), but it still brought me back to the days of actually being constantly preoccupied with body weight.
When I was a bit younger, in my late high school years, I was constantly on the scale and looking in the mirror.
At the end of my tenth grade school year, I found a new love for weight-lifting and (amateur) bodybuilding. I had always been a bit chubby in my younger years and felt very self-conscious about it so ,when I started working out and improving my physical image, I became a bit obsessed with how I looked. I never wanted to feel the need to wear a shirt to go swimming as I did as a child, and I certainly never wanted anyone to have a reason to give me the nickname "moobs" again (which stands for man boobs, for anyone unaware).
When I realized I was able to take control of my weight and my looks, I got addicted to it. For awhile it was mostly a positive change in my life; I was eating healthier, felt better, and found a new outlet for stress and anger. After a year or so, however, I started to notice a psychological change in myself. I became very preoccupied with thoughts of my body and what could be improved, so much so that I spent a fair amount of time in front of the mirror, flexing and pinpointing exactly where my "problem areas" were. I also got into the habit of weighing myself on the scale a few times every day, making note of any change, up or down. If the number had increased I would be worried that I had gained some unwanted fat and would scold myself for eating that bowl of ice cream the day before. If the number had gone down I would be worried that I was losing muscle mass and thus needed to change my workouts ASAP.
The truth of the matter is that, even if the number on the scale was accurate, the things I thought about myself and the negative feelings I felt in relation to that number were not accurate, not one bit.
I had gotten myself into the habit of checking my body weight daily as if the number I saw really had some sort of assigned value to it. I thought that the number on the scale was telling me how well or how poorly I was doing with my workouts and my diet; I thought it was telling me how good or how bad I looked physically. What it was really telling me was, by definition, my body's relative mass being acted upon by the downward force of gravity (if I'm a bit off here, just go with it; I'm just an unscientific English major with good intentions).
The point here is that our body weight is generally quite arbitrary. It has some functional importance when, say, picking out a chair to sit in or deciding if one more ride on that old tire swing is actually a good idea but, as a whole, we don't need to be aware of our body weight on a daily basis. When I was hyper-aware of my weight, as many people are, the number on the scale wasn't telling me anything except that I wasn't quite good enough.
It is a very helpless feeling to get stuck in that sort of psychological body-image trap, and I'm very happy to say that I have now gotten out of that trap and, for the most part, I haven't gone back. While I can't say that the scale is lying, I can say that it does give a false truth-- one which easily and often misleads people into believing that they are less beautiful, important, and worthy than they actually are.
If you have a scale and find that it brings you any kind of unhappiness whatsoever, my advice would be to bury it in that place where all of your other "undesirables" have gone, whether that be under the bed, in the closet, or straight to the trash. If you can't bring yourself to do that, have no fear, there's another solution: get a piece of duct tape, write "Fucking Fabulous" on it in bold, black marker and cover the screen of the scale with it.
