Does Your Scale Hold Emotional Weight?
Take a moment to answer a few questions:
Do you avoid the scale at all costs?
Is the only time you get on the scale at the doctor’s office?
Does the scale elicit emotion when you weigh yourself?
I have been working with clients for over 30 years and from the very start, scales have been a sensitive subject for most. My clients say they prefer not using the scale because the number evokes negative feelings. According to the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention, 71% of Americans are overweight or obese. Therefore, 7 in 10 people may not like the number on the scale.
Psychology Today (1) conducted an interesting survey with 4,000 respondents —3,452 women and 548 men (86 percent women, 14 percent men). The women who responded range in age from 13 to 90 and weigh between 77 and 365 pounds (89 women weigh 100 pounds or less; 82 women weigh more than 250 pounds). Men range in age from 14 to 82 and weigh between 115 and 350 pounds. Of those dissatisfied with their weight; 66% were women and 56% were men. When asked "How many years of your life would you trade to achieve your weight goals?" The findings are astounding: Fifteen percent of women and 11 percent of men say they'd sacrifice more than five years of their lives to achieve their weight loss goals; 24 percent of women and 17 percent of men say they would give up more than three years.
If you are like so many who dislike your ‘number’ on the scale, we can accept that you may never fall in love with your scale. We can look at other methods to show weight loss and maintenance such as body measurements, body composition and even your tightest clothing that you can’t zip or button. Yet, you may want to consider these facts and perhaps make a decision to not allow the scale to carry so much weight and instead, use the scale as an objective measure.
The Scale Can Motivate Behaviors
Click here to take a quick look at this adorable cartoon. Albeit the pets want to play outside and clearly will do just about anything to achieve their goal.
Take-away: The scale can be your signal that it is time to embrace healthy habits. It is a reminder to drink water, move more and consider more nutritiously dense foods.
The Scale Reflects Your Total Body Weight
When you weigh yourself on a traditional scale, it shows your total body weight. It does not reflect your body composition. Body composition scales will show you lean mass (muscle) and fat mass. A pound of muscle and a pound of fat both weigh a pound. The difference is the amount of space they take up in the body. Muscle is dense and compact versus fat which takes up more volume. This is why you can look at two people; an athlete and a person who does not work out. They may both be 5’3” and weigh 145 pounds; yet the athlete looks like she weighs 120 pounds. Muscle is also highly metabolic and will help you burn more calories.
These scales also reflect your hydration level. Fluid shifts will impact the results so use the body composition scale to show trends in your weight loss.
Take-away: Our goal is to lose body fat and strengthen our muscles to maintain our lean tissue. The leaner you are, the healthier you will be and smaller you will appear. I highly encourage my clients to use a body composition scale instead of a traditional scale. This will help you to reframe your focus from the total number to your lean body mass versus your fat mass. My clients find knowing these numbers is a motivator to exercise and include strength training.
The Scale Can Keep You Accountable
Research shows daily weighing does help people lose more weight than not weighing yourself.(2) In fact, studies have found people experience successful weight loss and maintenance with regular self-weighing and when they miss and slowly stop weighing, it is an early sign of weight gain. (3)
Unfortunately, when people overeat, findings show they avoid the scale the next day.4 I, too, have found when my clients overeat or go off course with their food, many stop their healthy habits such as journaling, taking their vitamins, exercising and weighing. Perhaps this is the old ‘on a diet, off a diet or I will just start Monday’ mentality.
Take-away: When you veer off course, do as your navigation tells you… recalculate your route…make a u-turn and get back to your healthy habits as soon as possible to get to your destination. We call this recovering from slip-ups and the sooner you recover, the less damage. I encourage my clients to return to their 90% ‘on your healthy habits’ and consider the overeating simply part of the 10% ‘enjoy what you want’. Be gentle on yourself because it often takes time to adopt this type of approach.
The Scale Can Become Your Indicator
The read out on the scale shows a number, not a word. Yet, weighing evokes positive and negative feelings including: relief, joy, shame, frustration, and guilt. In a study (5) looking at weight and its association with behaviors, positive weight changes encouraged participants in their weight loss attempt, while disappointing and frustrating weight measurements led some participants to want to give up on their weight loss attempt.
Yet overtime, some participants, both male and female, commented on becoming accustomed to the daily weighing routine. They found that their emotional reactions to the weight measurements reduced over time.
[I’m] feeling fewer strong emotions in either direction when getting on the scale.
What was very interesting in this study was the more the individuals remained consistent with weighing, the less emotion was placed on it.
I think I feel better about weighing myself now […], because you do it so often it’s not like a scary number anymore. You kind of know what to expect and I think ‘yes’ it’s less kind of horrible.
I'm finding I'm vaguely looking forward to weighing every day. Which is quite a big change about how I feel about the scale.
Take away: If you struggle with emotions tied to the scale, you may want to consider setting a goal to weigh consistently. The more you become consistent with weighing, the less emotion you will attach to the number. Try it! See if it works for you.
And finally, always remember you are so much more than your weight. We can work together to ensure that the number on the scale does not define you. If you are struggling with your weight and need support, book a Complimentary Discovery Call today.
1 Garner D., (2017, September 17). Body Image in America: Survey Results. Retrieved from https:www.psychologytoday.com/us/articles/199702/body-image-in-america-survey-results
2 Steinberg D., et al. (2013). The Efficacy of a Daily Self-Weighing Weight Loss Intervention Using Smart Scales and E-Mail. Obesity, (9), 1789-97.
3 Helander E., et al. (2014). Are Breaks in Daily Self-Weighing Associated with Weight Gain?. PLoS One, (11),e113164.
4 Tanenbaum M., et al. (2016). Overeat Today, Skip the Scale Tomorrow: An Examination of Caloric Intake Predicting Nonadherence to Daily Self-Weighing. Obesity, (11),2341-2343.
5 Frie K., et al. (2020). Analysing self-regulatory behaviours in response to daily weighing: a think-aloud study with follow-up interviews. (1),16-35.