This week’s Soften Saturday is a guest post from Erin, aka Fit Mama.  Follow her on Facebook for frequent doses of wisdom and tips on embracing your awesomeness.  Cuz you are already awesome.  Believe it!  –Johnna

Your scale is an asshole

Newsflash: you are living with an asshole.  He might be found in your bathroom or perhaps he is hiding, sneaking around in a closet collecting dust and waiting for you to stumble upon him again.  He doesn’t even bother to get to know you and what kind of person you are.  He doesn’t notice the awesome things you do every day.  The one thing he presumes to know about you isn’t even accurate.  With one simple action he makes you feel like dirt.  He announces your worth in a number and when it’s higher than expected can make you feel completely diminished.

I’m talking about your scale, but if you can grab that abstract in there and think of it as an actual person—I imagine (and sincerely hope) you would never, ever let anyone treat you this way.  So why take that from a household appliance?  You take shit like that from your toaster oven?  Your blender hurt your feelings lately?  Been hiding from and avoiding your electric toothbrush?  Of course not.

The number on your scale has nothing to do with your worth.

And while we all know others can and do judge you on your appearance, the people who matter truly do not.  There is not one single person in my life who I love because of (or in spite of) their weight.  And I know some remarkably fabulous people.  Seriously.

But let’s take a look at what your scale actually knows.  Well- give or take a good 10lbs (depending on the accuracy of your scale) it tells you how much your body weighs.  Kinda.  But there are a number of things that it doesn’t factor in that also show up, including;

*how recently you had a bowel movement

*how hydrated you are

*if and in which direction you are leaning

*the time of day

*if you’ve been sweating

*which shoes you are wearing

…and a number of other ridiculous factors.  Most importantly it doesn’t discriminate between lean muscle mass and body fat percentage.  Point blank- it doesn’t even know what’s up.

Now obviously if the scale reads over 200lbs you probably aren’t “really” weighing 150.  You know that.  But when the number can change 5lbs in one day it is just not the best way to gage progress.  My personal suggestion can be found here, but whether you step on the scale ever again or not—please don’t ever look to that piece of crap asshole to tell you anything about who you are.

It is possible to have a healthy relationship with this appliance but when little girls (and grown women) everywhere look to it to tell them how good or bad to feel about who they are we have a serious problem.  Our values system is completely screwed up in this way.  But yours doesn’t have to be.  And you sure don’t have to pass that on.

So try my ribbon method.  Use your scale. Try to lose weight for whatever reason suits you.  But if you hear nothing else I ever say hear this;

You are an important and worthy person. And not one bit of what makes you so shows up in any numbers, anywhere.  Not your credit score, not your drivers license number, not your shoe size and not your weight.

And the biggest secret of all is; once you get that down you are already much, much healthier than most.

LOVE, Mama

You can read more from Fit Mama here and also on Pinterest and Facebook. 

About Soften Saturdays:  Soften Saturdays features posts from me and others I admire on the topics of healthy body image, healthy living, being kind to ourselves and more.  Saturday is an especially great day to think about being soft with ourselves!