throwing away the scale...

[Miranda]

Have any of you ever done it? Thrown away your bathroom scale?

I am seriously considering doing it here of lately. I just don't know if I have the b@lls to do it! lol

For the last 30yrs, ever since I hit puberty, and gained my first womanly pounds, the weight watching began. And with it came the routine weighing on the bathroom scale.

Here lately I wonder if I would be better off if I just threw the d*mn thing away lol.

Thoughts?

[nscrbug]

I don't weight myself anymore...seriously. I haven't gotten on a scale in about a year. As far as I'm concerned, I don't need to see a number...I can tell just by how my clothes fit...or don't fit. Ha! Even when I go to the doctor's office...I'll get on the scale, but I tell my doctor that I do NOT want to know what the number is. So he just writes it on my chart and doesn't tell me. I'm sure if there were any concerns, he would say something.

[shootingstar]

I'm not sure if my bathroom scale is completely accurate. So I automatically add around 3-4 lbs. in my head. And the scale is only over 2 yrs. old.
Then back in another city, our bathroom scale broke completely after 10 years.

So I haven't had an accurate weigh scale for um...past 6 months or more. Right now, I haven't made an effort to think about getting a new scale.
I can still fit my clothes. I see myself in shorts and my long tights. Looks ok.

For myself personally I couldn't weigh myself every day nor weekly. I might have weighed myself weekly in a haphazard way for a period of 2 months at different times in life. But I simply drifted away from the habit and became forgetful to weigh-in. It would drive me slightly nuts. I don't know how some of you ladies handle this psychologically.

But then I'm the type of cyclist, that DOESN'T want to be told in advance, how much mileage I will be cycling in total for a cycling tour over a few days or weeks. It would sound too daunting too me at the beginning.

Right now, sleeping well is more important than the exact weight statistic for me.

Numbers...are just numbers. If I thought constantly I was 54, I surely will really start to feel old.

[luvmyguys]

I get on a scale when I'm at a doctor's office and I have to. Other than that, the last time I had a bathroom scale was when I was pregnant and neurotic about not gaining too much.

I get a little OCD when I do things like count calories or weigh myself, so I'm better off just going by how my clothes fit and how I feel.

[GLC1968]

I haven't weighed myself since early February of this year. I was a pretty neurotic weigher...for all my adult life (and most of my teen years) so for me to not step on it...it's pretty major. I don't even own a full length mirror anymore, so I'm totally going by how my clothes fit.

It's freeing. Truly. As much as I knew that the number was just a number, it didn't matter. It still wormed itself into my brain and in so many ways, determined if I'd have a good day or a bad one. It's ridiculous.

It's only been 2.5 months, so I can't say for sure if it's made any long term difference, but in the short term, I feel 1000 times better about myself. I'm fairly certain I haven't lost weight (even though I've been eating way better) but I'm judging my progress in other ways and it's a really, really nice change of pace.

Dump the scale. Who cares what it says? Unless you participate in a sport that has weight categories, it's only a number...and not a very critical one at that.

[lph]

Dump the scale. Who cares what it says? Unless you participate in a sport that has weight categories, it's only a number...and not a very critical one at that.

I've never had one. I weigh myself occasionally at the pool or at my in-laws, but the scale never tells me anything I don't already know, and sometimes it's just confusing.

[Crankin]

I weigh myself daily and I'm not making excuses for it. Sometimes I go to a weekly routine, but it seems like when I do, my weight goes up. It's like seeing a number on the scale reinforces that what I'm doing is working (or not). I like that feeling and since I do admit I care about my weight and the number I see, I'm not apologizing. I am not anorexic by any means, just trying to stay at the weight which is good for me, which is getting harder to do as the years go on. Since I love eating, cooking, and going out, I have to monitor.
I've had the same scale for 12 years and it still is very accurate.

[shootingstar]

I certainly have lived chunks of life/several years at different times without a bathroom scale at home.

Person should do what helps them feel good and healthy. Then forget about the weight. If the latter works, it makes living better.

[OakLeaf]

I weighed myself for a while at home. Then I didn't. It wasn't really a conscious thing to stop. When I was a gym rat, I'd weigh myself at the gym most days. Now I'm not, and I get weighed at the doctor's office when I go.

My weight has been stable for quite a while. There was a time in my life when it was very unstable. Weighing myself didn't have any effect that I noticed. The last time I lost a large amount of weight, it was when I stopped a particular medication, and made no other changes. I didn't notice the med causing the weight gain, because prior to that, it really hadn't been stable. It stabilized while I was on the med, and then stabilized again nearly 25# lighter when I stopped it.

Except that by "stable," I mean that hydration and GI tract contents (and hormones, back when I had them ) could cause fluctuations within a 6-7# range within a week, and my weight will stay within that range over the long term. But if I were really obsessing over the scale, fluctuations of 5% of my body weight might definitely work on my head.

When I was spending the winters in a cloudy climate, I'd gain 4-5# over the winter and lose it back again as soon as I started getting exposure to natural sunlight in the spring. I'll typically drop 2-3# in the last weeks of marathon training. It really doesn't matter whether I get on the scale or not. It's just that I'm aware of them because of having been on the scale before.

[Grits]

I weigh myself weekly, no more. At times in my life when I let months go by without weighing, I found that the weight gradually crept up until I had to work really hard to get back to my normal weight. I would rather catch it when it is just a pound or two rather than ten pounds. However, I don't obsess over the scale, and it doesn't ruin my day regardless. You might need to give it up for your own reasons.

[Miranda]

Thanks, ladies, good insights.

While I am happy to not see my scale go up when I get on it here of lately, I am just frustrated to not see it going down. It's been two months that I have religiously kept a food journal, in which I also record my weight. And to be frank, I am just sick of it. I have lost the weight I gained during my broken ankle surgeries. But now the scale has just been stuck.

I am not happy with how heavy and fluffy I am. I want to be leaner/lighter and more muscular/defined. But I am thinking maybe the common sense approach kept track of in my head might be better, i.e. did I eat healthy today? how's my exercise for the week been?

I have a friend who is very thin. I almost used to be that thin. And she is a slave to her scale, her diet with every piece of food she puts in her mouth, lots of exercise, the size of clothes only being a certain number, etc. While she is a beautiful little woman, I still just think, and for what? Is all this energy of unhappiness to stay that way worth it? I think I am crossing over to the camp that I don't think it really is.