Here is what I want you to do.  Go into your bathroom and get your scale.  Then take it outside and either put it in the trash or the “to donate” pile.  I’ll wait.

Finished?  Yes!!  Welcome to the Scale Free Club. Now hopefully you didn’t do it like I did and walk naked into the driveway and hurl it into the street. After the police left, assured by my husband they should let me stay home to “rest”,  I decided  having a scale serves absolutely no good purpose whatsoever and I am through letting some stupid little piece of equipment dictate my mood.  (I am talking about the scale not my daughter.)

Last year I started doing Bikram, training for the Avon Walk, and casually and I mean casually following Weight Watchers.  I was not in the least food focused and I lost a whole bunch of weight.  More importantly I felt great.  Not only that,  I actually felt like I looked great.  Cut to now- still going to Bikram but my food portions are starting to resemble plates from Land of The Giants.  I signed up at Weight Watchers and began weighing myself everyday and obsessing about weight loss instead of just paying attention to what I ate and exercising like I did before.  I was becoming very unhappy.  Even if I felt good in the morning if the scale didn’t reflect a significant weight change I was depressed.  Hence the terrible naked scene in the driveway.  I will interject and say I think Weight Watchers is a very good program and is pretty easy to follow.  I just got all weird about the numbers on the scale.

After all,  what can a scale tell me I don’t already know?  If I gain weight my clothes and my kids tell me.   If I am exercising and feeling good it does not, for obvious reasons, behoove me to check and see if I’ve lost weight anyway.  Staying happy about how I look is way more mental than it is physical.  It seems as if a recent study even agrees with me.  It shows that after two weeks of exercising the participants had a much improved body image even without weight or body shape changes.  http://hpq.sagepub.com/content/18/1/110

 So, join me.  If you didn’t do so when I told you to the first time get rid of the scale now!  I am not a doctor* but my advise is: Let’s take care of ourselves by eating good food and doing physical exercise we like and get on with enjoying our lives.  Being a healthy happy person can not be achieved through shame or feeling bad about yourself.  Pick someone else to feel bad for- like Republicans.

* But I have played one on TV as well as a nurse, bank teller, and stripper among others.