little miss muscles

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Instead of weighing yourself, take personal stock in a more direct fashion. Feel your body, including all the soft parts, the ones you like and the ones you don’t. Look at yourself in a large mirror. Naked. Every day. If I were a pessimist I’d call this aversion therapy, but really it’s meant to get you familiar with yourself on a seriously intimate level. Resist the urge to judge; just look.

If it helps, imagine you are exploring an unknown territory on another world, and you must memorize every feature. Mounds and crevices and varied textures are not unpleasant in a landscape; they simply exist. See everything, as often as you can stand it, until you know your body thoroughly. After all, this IS what your body looks like, whether you are seeing it or not.

On a day to day basis, we are quite capable of relying on our own personal knowledge of our bodies to tell us how we’re doing, how we’re feeling, and whether anything has changed — without a scale to help. We don’t need a scale. We don’t need a number. We can know when we have gained or lost weight, when something doesn’t look right, when we feel strange or unwell. In order for this to work, we have to cultivate a bodily knowledge, and I believe the scale is an obstacle to that.

With its numbers and its complex web of possible meaning, the scale stands between our bodies and our fullest conscious awareness of them; it defines us by pounds and not by how we actually feel; it enables us to rely on a number to tell us we are doing things right, instead of empowering us to decide when we feel our best.

The scale contributes to a culture that tells us that if we weigh more than X or less than Y then we cannot be happy with ourselves. And that, frankly, is bullshit.

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