Scale, I wish I could quit you

I weigh myself every day.

I can't help it! It's a compulsion. It's a fascination. It's interesting to see what happens day-to-day.

But try as I might to keep it framed as a curiosity, I can't help but take it personally when the scale doesn't say what I want it to. I'm setting myself up for near-daily disappointment, knowing that I'll be unhappy, maybe even discouraged. I'm giving myself a reason to fail.

I really need to quit doing that.

The reality is that the scale very, very rarely will ever say what I want it to. I know, from past experience, that my daily weight can fluctuate very widely, more than I ever realized. This means that I can go in one day and weigh in at 232 (my current low), then come in the next and discover I'm magically 234.

Did I really gain two pounds overnight, for real? Of course not. In order to really gain that much fat, I'd need to have eaten more than 5000 calories in a day. I know for a fact that I'm doing well on that front, staying around 1700 nearly every day. So it's literally not possible for me to have packed on two pounds of fat overnight, even on a crappy food day.

There are plenty of reasons that a daily weigh-in is inaccurate. Sometimes, we're still digesting food when we step on the scale. Other times, we're retaining fluid. When we're working on fitness as well as weight loss, the actual fat loss won't register on the scale, since gaining muscle makes the whole deal a trade-off: gaining muscle weight while losing fat weight. The scale doesn't discriminate.

Knowing all of this doesn't take away the disappointment of a bad weigh-in, however, and I carry that negativity with me through my workout. Sometimes, I shake it off by the time I'm done with my warm-up, but not always. Carrying that burden makes an exhausting workout that much worse.

Rather than focus on what the scale told me tonight, I think I'll instead focus on 14:56, the time of tonight's first mile. Or 4.7, the miles per hour I was running my intervals at. Or maybe I'll focus on 15, the number of pounds I was bicep-curling. All of these are better than anything I've been able to do since last winter. They're my current records.

From this day forward, I solemnly swear that I won't weigh myself more than once a week. I won't take its numbers as anything other than an interesting benchmark, and I won't ever allow myself to think that they're the most important part this journey.

There are better numbers out there.