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Confession.
Earlier this year, I broke my scale.
Nope, not as in stomp on it until it broke as a revolutionary act of self-love…(though that sounds awesome).
But as in…I stepped on it, just as I regularly did and it smashed to pieces below me.
For a quick moment I thought ‘I should take a photo of this, it might make a great blog post tale some day’ but that thought was quickly replaced by a wave of shame that I had somehow broken my scale into tiny little pieces on the bathroom floor.
Plus, there was a tiny cat wandering curiously nearby and these tiny pieces could damage her paws so I swiftly cleaned it up.
I wondered if it might be a gift that the scale broke, but shame quieted that thought in the moment. I knew logically that it was just a crappy scale and that it wasn’t that the scale couldn’t handle my weight. Or that I did something wrong. But shame has a way of ignoring our logic, doesn’t it.
I cleaned it up and went on with my days, scale-free.
I didn’t grow up having a scale in the house which was a smart move on my Mom’s part, not wanting us to get obsessed with our weight. Over the years as an adult, I ended up with one and stepped on it once in a while.
I knew that as someone who believes that our body weight doesn’t define our worth and that we are worth loving ourselves exactly as we are …that those numbers on the scale didn’t define me.
At the same time, I couldn’t help but notice my reaction to the number, making me think I was doing something ‘wrong’ if the numbers went up, rather than listening to my body. I felt like it cultivated the old diet mentality in me with the “I’ll do better tomorrow” thought process. Of course, I knew it wasn’t nourishing me to have a scale in the house, but somehow it just became a habit…a daily check in outside of my own intuition on how I was ‘doing’ and whether I was good enough that day according to the scale.
The days following the scale incident?
I’ve gotta confess they’ve felt like a sweet relief.
Freeing. Familiar. With Ease.
Most importantly, it feels like it is getting me in touch with how I feel in my body again. Whether it was a good day holistically and intuitively, not numerically.
It was around that time that I read this post by the wonderful Rachel Cole called The Weightless Year.
It was then that I really realized that it really was a gift that the scale broke.
As Rachel says: “The scale takes you away from yourself. Giving it up brings you home”.
Being scale-free got me back in touch with my internal scale & sense of self, rather than an outside source…one that somehow, despite all the work I’ve been doing over the years, was a regular voice in my life of what I was doing wrong or right.
I’m so grateful in the big picture that I’ve spent much of my life without a scale in the house (thanks Mom) and especially these days it just feels really right as a way to strengthen that internal voice that is learning to love myself just as I am and not by a number on a scale.
I’m not really big on ‘Resolutions’ and never plan them, but some years one just shouts at me to listen and take part. The rather dramatic smashing of the scale a few months back felt like it made space for me to join in on Rachel’s idea of the Weightless Year and give it a try this year.
Plus, this is my year of ‘Worthiness‘ and what a better way to clearly establish that I get to define my own worthiness than this!
I’m also loving this series over on The Militant Baker called The Smash the Scale Revolution…and while I don’t have a scale to smash (cause I already did just that) I’m in for the challenge.
In the end it really has been a gift to break my scale. With it, I feel like it broke a pattern, a daily way in which I put the voice of others ahead of my own.
What would going without a scale look like for you? For a week or a month or even a year? Or maybe you decided to ditch your scale a long time ago! I’d love to hear your thoughts & experiences around this?