I Bought a Scale, but I Keep It in the Basement

In all of my adult life, I’ve never owned a scale. My issues with food and my weight go all the way back to my very first diet at 5 years old. My (very obese) pediatrician put me on “the gum diet” (chew gum, not snacks) and my fate was sealed. I began my lifelong struggle with overeating, binge eating, constant dieting, and constant weight fluctuations. I started counting calories when I was 9, had a (thankfully brief) bout of bulimia when I was 14, and for all my childhood and teen years binged and dieted daily. I would sneak food to my room every day after school in the 15 minutes before my mom got home from work, having starved myself all day at school. I’d hide sleeves of cookies or crackers and bowls of chips or ice cream under the covers of my bed, eating furtively, ready to shove everything back under the covers if anyone came in my room. If supplies of junk food ran low, I might grab bagels or waffles or microwave pizzas, even resorting to globs of peanut butter mixed with sugar if there was nothing else.

In college I got really into the anti-diet philosophy introduced to me in books by Carol Munter (Overcoming Overeating) and Geneen Roth (Breaking Free from Compulsive Eating). I found peace with food and my body, and a big part of that was taking the advice to never weigh myself. I didn’t want to base my self-worth on a number on the scale. As I relearned what physical hunger felt like, my weight stabilized in a healthy range. I ate whatever I was hungry for, and vowed never to own my own scale. I didn’t believe I could ever have a healthy relationship with the numbers.

Despite my resolve, I’ve somehow managed to find ways to weigh myself over the years. And as life grew more complicated and my mental health declined, I lost that blissful peace with food and my body. My weight went up and down for the next 15 years.

I remember weighing in at the doctor one time in college and being slightly disappointed by the number: 146. I remember when I was working at a gym in my early twenties I used the locker room scale: I was 152 for months despite my efforts to slim down.

I grew very depressed when I was 27 and was barely leaving my apartment when my weight reached the highest it had ever been: I was 183 at my doctor’s visit, where I was also diagnosed with hypothyroidism.

During my subsequent time doing plays in Cape Cod I got down to around 150. I only know this because I would make regular trips to the scale section of a local Kmart and weigh myself in, hiding the scale at the back of the shelves and making sure to use the same one each time (since we all know that every scale is different).

While living in New York a few years later, I actually paid to rejoin a gym solely to use their scale. It was the last one I had used and I wanted to ensure that an update would be accurate.

While staying in Miami for Matt’s work I remember walking almost a mile to a nearby Publix supermarket to pay a quarter for the scale in the lobby. I was 170. Around the same time I joined Weight Watchers, betraying all of my feminist convictions and learning to count points. They gave me a little booklet and every weekly weigh-in produced a sticker with a number on it. I obediently put all the stickers in the little book, documenting my steady progress down from 183 to 163. At the 20 lb. milestone they gave me a keychain and I quit.

In more recent years I’ve secretly used the bathroom scale at my parents’ house, making sure not to eat or drink anything beforehand, quickly whipping off my shoes and clothes and finding the spot on the bathroom floor where I weigh the least. When I was on Adderall a few years ago, I watched my weight go from 211 down to 152, checking in at every family brunch.

For the past 2 years, I’ve been weighing in at my psychiatrist’s office. He has a little digital scale right outside his door and for the first several visits I wouldn’t even look at the number. Eventually I grilled Matt for all the details and soon just started looking at the scale myself. Some weigh-ins were agony, showing less than a pound lost over the 6 weeks between appointments. Others were shockingly good, like the time I lost 11 pounds during our trip to Berlin. I learned to be patient with my progress, feeling sure that this time was different, that I’d never go back to bingeing and gaining weight.

But then COVID happened, and I could no longer go to my doctor’s hospital for visits. We started conducting our appointments over Zoom and I had no way of knowing what my weight was doing. I told myself my weight wasn’t changing much, trying to keep myself from being disappointed when I finally did weigh in. But more and more time went by as our government bungled the management of the pandemic and it kept on spreading. There was no end in sight (there still isn’t) and I realized it would be a really long time before I wanted to risk walking into a hospital.

I started analyzing my body in the mirror: Was I any thinner? Was I gaining? I never got dressed in real clothes so I couldn’t even judge by how my clothes fit. When I started to become convinced that I was regaining all the weight I had worked so hard to lose, I decided it was time to buy my own scale. I knew the number would never coincide with the one on my doctor’s scale, but I could at least start a new marker.

I enlisted Matt in finding a reliable scale, and he found a very helpful article on Wire Cutter that went into great detail. They had tested a number of scales over a period of months, discovering that some scales don’t actually weigh you every time you step on them. They rely on digital memory to simply regurgitate the same number again and again until a large enough difference has been reached. He chose one that actually does weigh you every time and ordered it. Then when it came in the mail he made sure to test it himself. He used a level to find the flattest spot in the house, weighed himself, and then added a 6-pound weight which it registered exactly.

I credit Matt with the idea to only weigh myself on the same day of each menstrual cycle so hormonal fluctuations don’t affect the results (don’t ask me why everyone doesn’t do this). And I decided the best thing would be to keep the scale in the basement so I won’t be tempted to weigh myself more often. Clearly I am prone to an unhealthy obsession with my weight and I don’t want to make myself crazy. I still worry about the day that my weight goes up, or even stays the same. But this seems like the best solution for now, and hopefully I won’t be making any clandestine trips to the basement.