I didn't weigh myself today...

[Guest guest]

Hi all... I have been weighing myself once per week for that past 6 months or so and today I purposefully stayed off the scale because last week I got on and it was up 5 pounds (I knew I was retaining water but don't think that counted for the total gain). I had considered counting calories and I felt pretty bad about myself after that weigh in. I realized that my clothes are still fitting the same... my belt is still notched in the same place and I don't look different in the mirror so that is what I'm going to go by rather than the scale... and hope for the best. I sure feel better, but still a little nervous that if I do weigh myself in the future I'll discover an additional 20 pounds or something... yikes!

[Guest guest]

Congratulations ! That's a big step. I don't think the scale is a helpful tool at all... it makes us feel unneccesarily elated or depressed... both of which can lead to unhealthy eating patterns. i say leave it alone and learn to listen very closely to the messages your body is giving you. 

i am still working on this but it's always a work in progress!best,abby

 

Hi all... I have been weighing myself once per week for that past 6 months or so and today I purposefully stayed off the scale because last week I got on and it was up 5 pounds (I knew I was retaining water but don't think that counted for the total gain).  I had considered counting calories and I felt pretty bad about myself after that weigh in.  I realized that my clothes are still fitting the same... my belt is still notched in the same place and I don't look different in the mirror so that is what I'm going to go by rather than the scale... and hope for the best.  I sure feel better, but still a little nervous that if I do weigh myself in the future I'll discover an additional 20 pounds or something... yikes! 

[Guest guest]

Thank-you Abby... I think I'm going to put the scale in the closet and hope I forget. I had the urge to get on there again yesterday, but I remembered how bad I felt a week and a half ago. To: IntuitiveEating_Support Sent: Wed, July 7, 2010 9:27:54 AMSubject: Re: I didn't weigh myself today...

Congratulations ! That's a big step. I don't think the scale is a helpful tool at all... it makes us feel unneccesarily elated or depressed... both of which can lead to unhealthy eating patterns. i say leave it alone and learn to listen very closely to the messages your body is giving you.

i am still working on this but it's always a work in progress!best,abbyOn Tue, Jul 6, 2010 at 12:39 AM, Oceanlady65 <oceanlady65@ yahoo.com> wrote:

Hi all... I have been weighing myself once per week for that past 6 months or so and today I purposefully stayed off the scale because last week I got on and it was up 5 pounds (I knew I was retaining water but don't think that counted for the total gain). I had considered counting calories and I felt pretty bad about myself after that weigh in. I realized that my clothes are still fitting the same... my belt is still notched in the same place and I don't look different in the mirror so that is what I'm going to go by rather than the scale... and hope for the best. I sure feel better, but still a little nervous that if I do weigh myself in the future I'll discover an additional 20 pounds or something... yikes!

[Guest guest]

I am struggling, too, with trying to decide when to weigh and not to weigh. So far I've been mostly avoiding the scale, but I have a long history of avoiding it for years and years as a way of letting myself overeat without acknowledging the consequences of that--not just the weight gain, but also feeling physically terrible. For me, it's like avoiding the mirrors, and part of a feeling of shame about who I am now. I fluctuate avoiding the scale with being obsessive about weighing all the time, when I'm in a restricting phase.

So I've decided that I do indeed want to lose weight, but that I want to do it through IE and exercise that feels good. Last year I lost 30 pounds through WW, and I think for me that step was a good one only because it helped teach me what eating more normal amounts of food feels like, and I got reintroduced to my hunger and found ways to satisfy it with healthy but good-tasting foods (I used mostly whole foods, not using anything from the various diet foods available, including the WW food lines, except for their ice cream treats, which I truly like).

Now I want to set a gentle, adaptable, but tentative goal for myself of losing another 30 pounds this year, but I don't know how to do that without weighing myself every once in awhile. I'm so good at deceiving myself that I feel for me, now, the scale every once in awhile is not the worst thing. Martha Beck or Castillo (can't remember which-- is trained by Martha) has this exercise where you get on the scale and deal with the feelings that come up. I think normal intuitive eaters do weigh themselves from time to time, and I'd like to be able to do that without setting myself up for a freak out--either overeating because I have some pounds off, or restricting because I've gained.

I've been watching this show, "Obsessed," on A & E. It's about people with Obsessive Compulsive Disorder (OCD), and I think a lot of what they do applies to people with disordered eating--like them, we put sort of "magical" power into either eating or not-eating food, and we get into obsessions around it. The treatment for OCD is careful exposure to the emotions without being allowed to do the compulsion, and observing as the emotions take their natural curve of up and down. Jill Bolte , the neurologist who wrote the book on having a stroke, says that emotions only have a natural duration of 90 seconds, and if you can just wait them out, they get better. I think maybe I need to take some time after I weigh myself and go through the emotions it brings up, and maybe do some journaling. I don't want to go through the rest of my life either weighing all the time or not being able to weigh myself at all. Neither seems "normal" to me.

I'd love to hear any thoughts anyone has on this.

Laurie