My soulmate, my best friend. My despised enemy. My judge. My tormentor. That’s right…. It’s complicated. Is it love? Is it hate? Is it indifference? We have been in a relationship since the age of 13, 14, 15. Really. Every single day, very few days skipped. And in very bleak times, twice a day. That’s what I hear so often.
How many of you are in a relationship with your bathroom scales?
When the numbers are up, you hate yourself. You wear your fat clothes. You berate yourself. You denigrate yourself. You cannot look at yourself in the mirror. You try a new diet. You starve yourself. You work out twice as hard at the gym, even do an extra class or two.
When the number on the scale goes down. We’re happy. Confident. Thin clothes. Less restrictive eating. Maybe I can even miss out on a day at the gym?
Is that you? Are you in a relationship with the scale? Are you dictated to and controlled by a number on the scale? Is that number the number that defines your very being?
What if I told you that part of the reason for our body image concerns and weight obsessions is centred around our fixation on the belief that weighing ourselves daily is healthy.
That is an old, outdated and destructive belief that needs to be tossed out with the scale. Your weight is just a number. A number that does not define you, your worth or your value as a person. That number represented by an inanimate object has the power to bring such immense pain or immense pleasure.
It sounds quite absurd if we think about it logically and take our emotional self out of the picture. And in fact, that is essentially what we are doing. We are becoming disconnected to ourselves and to our body. We are becoming connected to an inanimate object that is powerfully manipulating our sense of self, sense of worth and sense of ‘okness’ by a number represented on its face.
Your scale doesn’t even have a heartbeat… so why give it that power?
Time for the divorce, the big break up… time for freedom. Time for connection and body wisdom.