the scale i own is sitting in a bag next to the door waiting for a goodwill pick-up.
that was one of my new year's resolutions: rid my room of the scale.
to be fair i never really used it. once or twice in the past year, maybe. instead i would find it stored away in strange places like in my suitcase or sandwiched in a storage bin under my bed--such is the life of a new yorker where there's never enough space and storage is a commodity.
so while i never used it, i'd every so often unearth the thing.
and i'd feel it taunting me, climb on, it would say. let's play--let's have some real down-home-fun.
i got the thing my freshman year of college when this disaster (i mean, adventure?) began and i still thought that the measure of one's health (and thus subsequent worth) was determined by the three numbers the scale offered up to me.
now in my old-age and generally-aknowledged (ahem) wisdom i know better. my health is the culmination of countless factors--many of which i can't control. but i know when i'm eating well. and i know when i'm exercising. and i don't need a scale to measure those things. so ipso-facto-ergo...what use have i for this antiquated device? scales provide the surface amount of information. they hint at things. like health. but they aren't the end-all-be-all.
i remember seeing something on a blog once about bus-stop benches in sweeden? norway? denmark?--some progressive european country. as a way to discourage obesity they had taken to measuring the weight of the seated person and projecting that number up above. i know what you're thinking: shocking, appalling, the wrong approach, right?
well...maybe a bit misguided but the more i thought about it the more i realized the number projected is simply that: a number.
our outrage stems from the shallow notion that weight is the ultimate end. in our culture each number comes with a stigma--an emotional attachment. bridget jones tells me that 140 is an unacceptable number. whereas, when i'm at 140 i border on looking way-too-thin. i see tweets all the time--people saying they're this tall and this is their goal number because that's how tall so-and-so is and that's how much they weigh. but weight sits differently on different people. we truly cannot compare our body to anyone else's--it's not fair, not healthy, and a really ridiculous benchmark.
maybe what we need to work on before we can worry about lowering the number that's flashing above us is detaching the number from the story we've assigned to it. it's just a number, that's all. and yes, it provides us with some information--but it's such a small slice of the pie.
when i started physique i looked leaner almost immediately and the number on the scale increased by more than a few pounds. oh wait, this was mean to be a physique update, no?
okay, okay, that'll come this afternoon...