Dump the Scale

Is your scale making you fat? Scales are evil, evil contraptions. Period. Especially when someone is trying to lose weight. A person's weight can fluctuate up to five or more pounds from morning to night and will be all over the place throughout the day. It can really make or break someone trying to eat healthy, exercise and lose weight if they take the number on the scale to seriously.

Take into consideration, someone who has about 25-30lbs to lose. If they work out hard, eat healthy, drink their water for an entire week. They get on the scale and see they have either stayed the same or are only down a pound or so and are not happy with that and just give up, going back to their previous eating and couch potato habits. This is purely psychological. Now, a person with a significant amount of weight to lose may see big numbers lost at first, but after awhile they will start to see a slow weight loss as well, and when you have say 100lbs to lose, the scale can be your worst enemy. It can seem like time is moving to slowly and you are making little progress. This is why it is so important to forget that number.

That scale number is nothing but a number. If they rely solely on that number they will surely fail. Some people understand that their weight fluctuates and can move past it and just keep on eating healthy and working out. However, the majority of people trying to lose weight will get discouraged by the number on the scale and just give up. Do you know how sad that is? If that person were to have taken their measurements as well as their weight the first week, and waited a month to check on progress they would have been more satisfied, for it is the overtime progress that counts, not the day to day progress. Not to mention that in reality, we all want to be smaller and more toned and fined, which means losing inches from working out and eating healthy is a better thing to hope for. Often times if you don't see the number on the scale, you will see the number in inches lost.

An article in the Sydney Morning Herald discussed how drs are now saying that getting rid of scales is absolutely necessary in order to control obesity, in children especially. It is shown that people, especially young girls are more concerned with the number on the scale and weighing very little than actually eating healthy, and excercising daily. Self-esteem seems to rely solely on the number on the scale and that is very sad and wrong. The most important thing is to be healthy. Toss the scale. If you can't completely toss it, at least only pull it out once every two weeks or so and don't rely to heavily on what it says. If you continue to eat healthy and exercise and drink your water, you WILL see results. They may not be that immediate gratification we all want to see, but they WILL come. Just keep at it. Don't let a number rule you. By the way, get rid of the word "diet" from your vocabulary. True, diet is a word that means what it is that you eat, but for most people, a diet is something temporary you go on to lose ten pounds to fit into something, then when you fit into it, you go back to old habits. A new way of eating, a healthy way of eating for life is a better option.