Should You Get Rid Of Your Scale?

I'll bring the matches.

Disclaimer: You’re reading this column because you value my input as a journalist who reports on these issues and therefore has a lot of informed opinions. I’m not a healthcare provider and these responses are not meant to substitute for medical or therapeutic advice.

Q: Hey Virginia!

I have a question for your Ask Virginia column. It’s fairly simple, straightforward, and I’m very scared of the answer I’m gonna get, but whatever you say, I’ll do:

Should I get rid of my scale?

Should I not even own a scale?

Thanks!

—A girl who’s afraid of regretting getting rid of her scale the minute she does.

Yes, you should get rid of your scale. 

Yes, you should not even own a scale. 

Yes, we should light all the scales on fire and dance naked and free around them while they burn. (Scientific American actually did this for me once, for this story. Okay, not the naked dancing part.)

But you knew all of that. 

You also probably know that having a scale at home is an invitation to track and obsess and think about your weight as a metric you should somehow be able to control. If you have kids in your house, it’s also an invitation for them to track and obsess and think about their weight as a metric they should somehow be able to control. We live in a culture that believes body size determines our beauty, health and moral value—so weighing yourself daily is like forcing yourself to take a brutal pop quiz every morning and you can only pass or fail and probably, only fail. You don’t need to fail a test every day because you are an awesome person whose value cannot be measured in pounds. So you don’t need to own a scale. 

Now, I’ve talked before about whether you should get weighed at the doctor’s office, and noted that there are a few conditions (eating disorder recovery, heart failure, etc) where a medical professional knowing your weight can be important. But that doesn’t mean you need to know your weight. And it definitely doesn’t mean that you need to know it every day or once a week or after you’ve eaten a big meal, or gone for a long run, or whatever other ritualistic schedule you may have used for weighing yourself in the past. In fact, with most of those medical conditions, monitoring weight at home would be unnecessary or even contraindicated—someone weight restoring from an eating disorder certainly shouldn’t be doing this. 

The only time I can recall feeling like a home scale was medically necessary in my life is when we bought an infant scale in 2013. Our older daughter was a feeding tube-dependent baby in between open heart surgeries and we were required to record her weight and blood oxygen levels daily because any sudden drop on either number could have been a medical emergency. I am pretty sure you are not a medically fragile infant because you wrote such a good email! So you don’t need to own a scale. 

Infant scale in action. Photo by Cavan Images via Getty Images

I hear you on the fear that you’ll regret getting rid of the scale. I started weighing myself in middle school; my dad weighed himself every day of my childhood and I thought it was just something we did to be healthy (because yes, we equated healthy with thin). It’s scary to reprogram ourselves to think of the scale as optional, useless, or even detrimental. If you’re an overachiever type, it can feel like you’re not checking all the boxes you’re supposed to check. If you’re fat, weighing yourself may feel like one of the ways you perform being a Good Fatty. But all of that is stuff we do for other people. There might be times in a scale-free existence where it feels hard not to be pleasing others. But I wonder what you would really regret, for yourself, if you get rid of the scale? 

I can tell you that it helped my health not at all to weigh myself daily, which I did for most of my twenties. It didn’t help to weigh myself before and after long runs. It didn’t make me happier the day I felt like running an entire half marathon “didn’t count” because I somehow weighed more after it than I had first thing in the morning. And it certainly didn’t improve my health to then go for a long run the very next day and fracture my foot. All because I was measuring my health and my success as a person pretty much solely by the number on the scale. It may be hard to get rid of your scale and you deserve support while you work through what it means to reject the expectations that come with tracking your weight. But I don’t think you’ll regret giving yourself a break from the pressure to perform your body. So you don’t need to own a scale. 

In that doctor’s office piece, I also noted that there is some inherent fatphobia in being afraid of the scale. I wrote: 

If you know, on some level, that you’re refusing to see the number because it will make you feel bad, it’s worth noting that you have some work to do disentangling body size and value. 

Both your attachment to your scale and the negative feelings that the scale can evoke are rooted in anti-fat bias and that’s worth naming and investigating. But even if neutralizing your feelings about your weight is the goal, frequent home weigh-ins are not how we get there. Because in a perfect world, we wouldn’t attach moral value to our weight, and a number on the scale wouldn’t change our emotional state in any way. But in this world, we also wouldn’t pursue intentional weight loss because thinness wouldn’t be celebrated and fatness wouldn’t be demonized. And we wouldn’t equate weight with health and doctors would provide weight-inclusive care instead of prescribing weight loss. So even if you live in a magical fatphobia-free utopia, there is no reason for you to own a scale.

Because if any of us are ever going to get to live in that world, we need to light the scales on fire. 

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Diet Culture At the Family Table: Very pleased to announce that I’ve got a new webinar on weight stigma and feeding disorders live now over at Responsive Feeding Pro. It’s geared towards feeding therapists and dietitians but has lots of good info for parents, teachers, and other caregivers too—if this piece resonated with you, you may find it useful. (And it’s just $32, plus they have a $10 rate for students and marginalized folks!)

Read This: Margaret Wheeler Johnson for Bustle on the high rates of eating disorders among nutritionists.

Last Chance! Corinne and I are recording our next AMA episode on Thursday, so if you’ve got questions to submit, here’s where they go.¹

1. Heads up: I am collecting email addresses on this form now, because we had a few gross comments come through. I won’t do anything with your emails unless you send me threats, wow so cool that this even needs to be said!