Is Your Scale a Friend or a Foe?

The benefit of a scale is that it gives you feedback. Like a compass, it lets you know what direction you are headed in, and allows you to make adjustments accordingly. However there are a few possible pitfalls that arise when you begin to rely solely on a scale to determine your feelings about yourself and your behavior.

One of the most common hazards of the bathroom scale is that, although it appears to be helping you to lose the extra weight and achieve a life of slenderness, it can insidiously begin to control you.

When you rely on a scale to tell you how you are doing, you are looking outside of yourself for acknowledgement. It’s very easy to get caught in the game of “trying to beat the scale.” For example, you may have eaten a very salty meal, causing the numbers on the scale to go up. Instantly you become consumed by a sense of defeat. In reality the only thing that is being measured is the water content of your body, which fluctuates widely, even throughout a single day.

Weighing yourself can become an obsession. Did you ever weigh yourself, go to the bathroom, and weigh yourself again? Another common scenario for the perpetual dieter is stepping on the scale in the morning, working out furiously, and then quickly making a beeline for the bathroom scale again, in the hopes of getting a new response. Many dieters can relate to the painful obsession caused by a subtle or not so subtle addiction to the scale.

The scale can often be a way to convince the subconscious mind that we are on some kind of a temporary mission to lower our body weight. As soon as that occurs, and we succeed, either by starving ourselves or exercising excessively, then we can go back to our normal way of eating. We may try to beat the scale or trick the scale in an effort to insure that we get the results we so desperately wish to see. Though the scale may appear to be keeping us in line and helping us to work towards our coveted goal, in reality the scale often serves as a way to continue to put distance between our selves and our true goals.

This is because our true goal, if we look deep inside our hearts, is to learn to live in harmony with food on a permanent basis, to honor and care for ourselves, and most of all to learn to trust ourselves around food. Yes, of course you want to live at your ideal weight. But don’t you also want to live in freedom? Being a slave to the scale robs you of the liberty from compulsion around food that you long for.


The only way to have permanent results with weight loss is to learn to trust ourselves when it comes to food. When we are eating out of physical hunger, and selecting those foods which nourish our bodies and sustain our lives, we no longer need to cling to a scale to tell us whether we’ve been “good” or “bad.” We have an innate knowing that, although we may be overweight in the moment, we are heading in the right direction. We also know that slow and steady is what is going to win the race. Even if we accidentally overeat one day, we begin to automatically balance that by eating less the next day, or taking an extra walk. We get a feeling sense that we are heading in the desired direction—that of our ideal weight, and even more importantly, freedom from food addiction.

The scale keeps us looking outward for feedback. If we “trick” the scale by measuring water weight, we are keeping our compulsion with food in place. Over the long haul, the only way to succeed is to make peace with food, and learn to truly enjoy the healthy foods that sustain our health and our quality of life. When exercise is used as a tool to get the scale to tell us what we want it to, it becomes a tedious chore that we tolerate in order to gain a specific result. Instead, when activity becomes a way of life—something that we miss when we don’t have a chance to do it—we find more and better ways to incorporate exercise into the day.

When used correctly, the scale can be a wonderful way to confirm what you already know—that you are in the process of mastering your relationship with food, your body and your self. A once-a-week weigh-in can be a lovely ritual to help you celebrate your commitment to yourself and your health.

If you do choose to own a scale, make sure that it is not your only feedback mechanism. Remember to celebrate all your victories—not just the numbers on the scale moving in the desired direction. Your jeans feeling loose, realizing that you are no longer tempted by the ringing bell of the ice-cream truck, or going out to dinner and making the healthier choice when ordering, are all causes to acknowledge yourself and rejoice in the fact that you are indeed moving forward towards your goal. The ultimate freedom is the deep sense of satisfaction that comes when you absolutely know that you can trust yourself around food. With or without a scale, the only place to gain that sense of security around food is within your own self. Remember, the true power for the permanent change that is reflected on the numbers of the bathroom scale is inside of you always.
By: Rena Greenberg