Sunday, May 31, 2009
Life, Health + Fitness

By the numbers

Focused on your weight? Don’t be! Scales aren’t accurate portrayals of how healthy you are

By Colleen Oakley

Every time my husband Fred goes to Target by himself, he inevitably comes home with something that’s not on the list. Last week, it was a scale.

“Look, honey!” he said. “I bought a scale.”

“I can see that,” I said, eyeing it the same way Harry Potter looks at Voldemort.

I don’t like scales, and I try my best to stay away from them whenever possible. At my yearly doctor visits, I close my eyes when the nurse is weighing me, and I don’t let her say the number out loud.

It’s not that I fear that I weigh 200 pounds, and I don’t want to face it. I’m pretty sure I’m still in the 140 to 150 range that I’ve been in since college. It’s that the number has too much power over me. If it was 147, I would lament all day long about the days when it was 140. How did I let 7 pounds creep up on me like that? If it was 141, then I would become obsessive about keeping it at 141, stepping on the scale every day to make sure half a pound didn’t suddenly appear after breakfast.

At a recent health and fitness conference I attended, an exercise physiologist lectured about how our culture puts too much importance on the scale. “Your weight in pounds doesn’t tell the whole story,” he said. “You could be a svelte 135 pounds, but have a very high percentage of body fat, which is still unhealthy.”

He advised everyone to get off their scales and stand in front of the mirror naked. “Jump up and down,” he said. “If it jiggles, it’s fat.”

It was reassuring to have someone back up my thoughts about scales, but that didn’t help my current dilemma. Fred had placed the evil machine right on our bathroom floor. It stared at me every morning, taunting me.

I was curious how close my driver’s license weight (144 pounds) was to my real weight, and as it usually does, curiosity won out.

151 pounds, the digital screen blinked.

OK, maybe a little more than I expected, but not the end of the world. I forced myself to remember that I had been taking a lot of weights classes, and that my toned arms and legs still looked toned, no matter what the scale said.

And I tried not to focus on how every morsel of food I put in my mouth over the next week would reflect in the number on the scale. But I knew myself too well. I was becoming obsessed, stepping on it two, even three times a day, letting that number dictate how I felt about myself.

So I told my husband to hide the scale. And that he wasn’t allowed to go back to Target by himself.

Now I focus on the numbers that really matter—BMI, cholesterol, body fat percentage—and if I happen to gain a pound, or drop two in the process of maintaining my health, I guess I’ll never really know. And that’s just fine by me. SP
Colleen Oakley is a freelance writer in Atlanta and the former editor of Women’s Health & Fitness magazine. Got a fitness challenge for her? E-mail her at colleen@sundaypaper.com.