Taking a break from the scale

I was watching The Biggest Loser tonight and I felt resonated by something.  A lot of the people on that show bust their tails all day long so that when weigh time comes, they can show a big loss.  They very often lose tremendous amounts of weight in just, what I am assuming, is a week's time.  A guy tonight lost 12 lbs since the last weigh in.  I don't think that is healthy at any size, even with strict supervision like they have. Granted, I lost 50 lbs in less than three months, myself.  But I do know that it is time to slow down my weight loss and proceed at a normal rate in order to ensure that I will keep it off once I get to my goal.

A few of the ladies on TBL tonight lost 1 or 2 pounds, a completely normal loss, yet they were absolutely mortified by it, and you could actually see the wind go out of their sails.  The trainer's faces showed disappointment.  Why?  Because they (and I, in the past) let a scale, a piece of plastic, tell them if they had been "good" or "bad".  Some of the ladies even gained weight, which is also normal when you hit a plateau or lose a lot of weight very quickly.  Your body needs a chance to catch its breath!

Which brings the conversation back to me.   For two months I weighed myself every day.  Every day. Then, I hit my first 50 lbs loss last week, but guess what?  I weighed myself today and I have gained one pound.  I didn't do anything that I had not done before, but I did have to remind myself that my body is settling.  I am not going to let a scale dictate my happiness.  I am uber proud of how far I have come, I know that I am eating right, I know my clothes are getting too big, and I know that I feel a whole lot better than I did on December 1st.

So, I have decided to put my scale away for a while.  I was weighing myself every morning and I have got to stop doing that and this little one-pound gain was my cue to do so. It's my body trying to get my attention and tell me to use my brain and stop letting the numbers on the scale "make" me.  I am going to just weigh myself every few weeks now because I felt myself falling into old habits.  You know the ones where you put time-limits on yourself like, "I'll lose X amount of pounds by ...."

You simply can not do that to yourself.  If you don't meet that goal by the time you want to, then you'll feel like you're not doing something right.  I think from now on, it'd be better to give myself goals that are healthy achievements, based on what my body can do now as opposed to what it couldn't do before I started losing, instead of shooting for a certain number.  Things like On Dec 2nd I couldn't ______, but now I can. 

In my heart, I am a runner.  My body wants to run but it simply can not right now.  So my goal is to start running.  This means that my walks will have to become jogs. From jogging will come running.  But .... I am giving myself the time to accomplish this with no deadline to have it done.  I may not be a runner by the end of 2012.  Heck, maybe not even by the end of 2013, and that is okay.

So my scale is going to go into the closet and come out only once a month, even though WW wants you to weigh in once a week.  Once month is fine, I think.  Since I already know my weight as of today, my next weigh-in will be around this time next month.

Now that my back is no longer killing me from carrying so much weight, I can focus on being healthy in other ways instead of "pounds lost".  

Step 3 of Charlotte Kasl's16 Steps To Empowerment says:  We make a decision to become our authentic selves and trust in the healing power of the truth.

I'm going to have to just trust my body to handle everything because the truth is that I'm eating right, feeding it healthy food and clean water, and moving it five times a week.  The scale doesn't know the truth, my body knows.

That's self-love.