I weigh a lot. A lot of a lot. I know this for sure, because I weigh myself nearly every day. This is a holdover habit from one of the last diets I truly threw myself into. My scale is in my entrance hall. Seriously, you come in, welcome to my home, there are the main stairs, the doors to the two front rooms, a table with a bunch of minor clutter like mail and keys, a bench for putting on shoes, and the world’s most heavy duty scale.
I own this scale because my mother bought it for me. I already owned two scales before that, but I had exceeded their weight limits and was no longer weighing myself. Nevertheless one of those scales was (and still is) in my master bath and one was (and still is) in my family room where I go to relax and unwind. Nice quiet reminders that I am so goddamned fat that even scales don’t fit me.
Me not weighing myself freaked my mother out so much that she spent about $100 to send me an unsolicited scale in the mail. This pissed me off. Who the fuck was she to be telling me I needed to weigh myself? (And expecting to hear about the results, with decimals.) This was when I was still deeply enmeshed in diet culture and self-hatred, not to mention poor family dynamics (obviously), so it took a lot to break through my shell and cause me to get pissed off in self-defense.
Nowadays if someone did something so absurd at me, I would return the thing for an amazon gift card and use it to buy fucking awesome fat clothes or astronaut ice cream.
Back then I just left it in its box for a year. One day the diet wave rolled around again, the need to know the fucking decimals became overpowering, and boom, the scale was out of the box, the weight was recorded, and my entrance hall was slightly redecorated.
I’m a journaller and I record a lot of daily data about things like food, activity, what I do with my time, whether I took my meds, whether I had sex, etc. So you can imagine that as soon as I started weighing again, I had to write those weights down. In red ink, at the top of each journal page. Then the pages without them were naked, so all the pages needed weights, and the need to weigh every day was firmly established.
And so it goes. Now I’ve declared my supposed freedom from diet culture, am working on intuitive eating, self-liberation, and all, but I still weigh almost every goddamned day.
My nutritionist has suggested I run the scale(s) over with my car and make some sort of art from the pieces.
I’m not there yet. Maybe someday.
Fat, Fab, and Forty 