The Scale

There is a great hot tub in the women's locker room at my health club.

I L O V E it.

I love having a good soak in very hot, deep water. I love the bubbles. I love the whole experience.

I even have a favorite sitting spot in the hot tub: the bottom left-hand corner closest to the showers. I like it because the water jets are positioned perfectly to hit all my achy spots. I can just lean back and let the bubbles and heat take my cares away.

This sitting spot is also positioned so I can see all the other women come and go through the locker room as they make their way to the sauna, the steam room and the change area.

Smack dab in the middle of all that action is THE SCALE.

As much as I love the hot tub, I hate the scale.

It has been my own personal nemesis for pretty much my whole life.

I was a fat kid; a fat teenager; a fat adult.

As a teen and young adult, I certainly had bouts of thinness. But, pretty much, I was fat.

Having an eating disorder for many, many years didn't help my relationship with food or the scale either.

I avoided the scale like the plague for years on end. If I had to get weighed, I'd turn my back to the numbers, so I wouldn't have to see the damage.

When I was on a diet, I was more open to the scale, because the number was generally going down. But still and all, the scale was something to be feared and avoided.

Anyway, from my vantage point in the hot tub, I watch, with continual amazement a vast number of women that just hop on that hulking piece of metal with nary a thought.

Yep, they just trot on over to the scale, get on it, look at the number , step off it and seem to go on about doing what every they had planned to do for the rest of the day.

Some women get on naked; many get on with their clothes on. A BUNCH get on with their shoes on. Doesn't matter if they are big women or little women or old women or young women. It's just "hop, read and move on".

Now, before you all think I'm a total scale voyeur, let me just say that the numbers are so small on the digital read out, I can't tell what their weight actually is. The number is really not the point.

The point is that I'm just so amazed at how little power the scale has over them BUT still seems to have over me.

It's ridiculous. Totally, incredibly ridiculous.

I'm sure that some of the women who confidently step on the scale dread the results as much as I do. I'm willing to bet that for some of those women , their own personal beratement tapes start going off in their head the second they get off of that scale.

I'm currently struggling with keeping a commitment to weigh myself once a week. My weight is reasonably under control (meaning, I weigh more now than I did right before Ironman last summer, but that is totally understandable. I weigh a lot less than I did a year ago and have seemed to avoid a gigantic winter weight gain).

So the number isn't as bad as I fear it is going to be, yet getting on the scale is really rough.

I need to keep up that commitment though, so the number doesn't creep up.

In reality, my goal is to really lean up between now and June so I can haul less ballast up the hills of Madison in September....

That is going to require a commitment to eating less and hopping on that box more.

I'm just not going to do it with my shoes on.