Weighty Issue

It’s funny the things that can inspire a blog post. For this one, it was my annual physical (very important, by the way – please go, please take twenty minutes once a year to look after yourself). Every year my check-up starts with the blood pressure / height / weight triumvirate, and every year I have to tell the nurse, “The other two are great, but I don’t do my weight.” And, every year the nurse says “Oh!” and hesitates, and frowns, and says “And she’s good with that?” (“she” is my doctor), and I say “Yes”, and I don’t get weighed.

Being weighed, for me, would be like pouring a gin and tonic for an alcoholic. Knowing my weight is, to say the least, angst-inducing. It sets off a chain reaction of obsession. If the number is “bad” (higher than I want it) well, then, of course I need to get it down. If it’s “good” (lower than I think), that actually just prompts the same response. I need to keep it there. No wait, ideally, I need a five-pound cushion. And, after that, another five-pound cushion would be prudent … As I write this, I know this isn’t a logical thought process, but it’s mine, and I own it, and I’m respectful enough of it – and its power – that I’m not about to mess with it. Especially when the solution is as simple as just not being weighed.

GREAT BIG CAVEAT: I am not a doctor. If you, or your doctor, or medical professional, wants you to be weighed, then you should be weighed. I also totally understand why babies / infants / young children need to be weighed – you need to put them in the right car seat, they need the right amount of medication for their weight, etc.

However for myself, personally, I’ve gone through the last several years (like maybe nearly twenty?) not being weighed. And, yes, this includes both my pregnancies and, no, my midwives had no issue with that. Not at all. In fact they were probably the most nonchalant of all people I’ve ever met about not weighing me. The only times I really, really need to know what I weigh is for my passport, or for the DIN adjustment on my downhill ski bindings. And then close enough is good enough. I know roughly what I weigh. I know what I weighed twenty years ago, and I still wear the same size of clothes (I may even have one or two clothing items that are still with me from those days, although I’m not going to disclose what they are).

This is Grace’s take on the bathroom scale, from Chapter Seventeen of Objects in Mirror:

… On autopilot I prepare for my morning weigh-in. Toe the bathroom scale out from the corner where it lives. Breathe in, then out, whooshing every spare bit of air from my body, willing lightness into my step as I raise my left foot …

… and freeze. No more numbers. The words – or something like them – swim back to me through eleven hours of solid sleep. Leave me balancing, one-footed, as I prepare to get my first number of the day. Success or failure right here in front of me.

And then she does something, but you’re going to have to read the book to find out what …

We don’t have a scale in our house. My boys find out what they weigh at the doctor’s, once a year, or when they visit people, like their grandparents, who have a scale. They don’t seem to care much what they weigh, apart from a vague sort of pride that they’re getting bigger. Even I was stunned when I found out my older son weighed 99 lbs. It’s hard to believe I have a child that big!

I’m not an expert, and I can’t say what works for everyone, but I will say not having weighing as a normal activity in our household works for us. I wasted too many precious minutes in my younger years waiting for those numbers and then went on to waste too many more precious hours worrying about them. I don’t want that preoccupation in my home.

By all means, if you need to track your weight for valid health reasons, do so. Or if you love knowing your weight – good for you. But if stepping on that scale is something you dread, and there’s no good reason to do it, then – maybe – don’t … do something good for yourself instead; eat a carrot stick or walk around the block.

Or do the thing Grace does in OIM!