I Weighed Myself for the First Time in 7 Years
It didn’t go great.
Today’s essay discusses scales and the disordered behaviors they can enable, and also includes specific examples of internalized fatphobia. Take care of yourself. And yes, this essay is paywalled because it’s vulnerable and not, in any way, for the trolls. If you think it would be helpful for you to read but a paid subscription is out of reach, just hit reply to this email and let me know you’d like a comp. Thanks so much for supporting this work!
It would not shock even a casual reader of this newsletter to learn I do not have a scale in my house. I don’t own a scale for the same reason I don’t own a gun—I don’t trust myself or my kids to use one safely. “Get your scale out of the house” is one of the first tips I give when I’m asked what parents can do to make their home safer for their kids’ bodies. That’s because I remember how old I was (11) when I started stepping on my dad’s scale every morning—and I’ve interviewed plenty of people who started even younger. I also remember how old I was (16) when I started making sure I weighed myself before breakfast, after peeing, and without so much as an earring on, so the number would be as low as possible.
There is nothing health-promoting about a child knowing their weight, let alone feeling compelled to monitor it on a daily basis. And I’d argue there’s nothing health-promoting about this kind of tracking behavior in adults either (apart from a few medical conditions that require frequent weight monitoring to manage). Weighing ourselves regularly conditions us to attach moral and emotional value to those numbers and then to ourselves.