No Scale Summer Challenge

OriginalPegs

I’ve lost over 100lbs but recently have become obsessed with the scale. When it doesn’t move I get upset, comfort eat which causes me to gain weight and a vicious cycle ensues. I want to change that, I want to measure my success by different metrics, how my clothes fit, how I look, how strong I am etc.

I plan on not weighing myself for at least 2 months, starting April 1st and I propose we as the collective MFP family lock away our bathroom scales and focus beyond lbs and kilograms, whose with me?!

NovusDies

I put my scale away for extended periods of times at the beginning of my weight loss journey. I weighed the first time after about 6 weeks and the second after almost 8. I had a bad relationship with the scale and it was better for me to stay off of it. Putting it away was beneficial. It helped to take my focus away from being results-driven and put it on being process-driven.

With time and education though my relationship with the scale has improved. I am still process-driven and my focus is on trying to get through each day as happy as possible and letting the weight loss just happen. I don't love it when the scale goes up but I understand it better now and I have seen it go up and down enough to know that the ups are always temporary.

If your instinct right now is to put your scale away I highly encourage you to do it. While it is away I encourage you to educate yourself on weight fluctuations. Here is a good article to get you started:

http://physiqonomics.com/the-weird-and-highly-annoying-world-of-scale-weight-and-fluctuations/

If you don't have a food scale I do encourage you to get one and really work on logging accurately. It is much easier to trust the food scale than the bathroom scale because it helps you confirm you are in a deficit.

I won't be joining you on this challenge because I have moved past the need. I hope you do too.

Good luck.

zeejane03

I'm in maintenance and my daily weigh-ins are one of the tools that I use as part of my weight management plan. The data from my weigh-ins have been very helpful for me, but if weigh-ins are stressful for you OP then it probably is a good idea to take a step back from the scale for a while. Just make sure you're using some other metric to keep an eye on your progress.