Ep. 81 Weighing Yourself

Hi, and welcome to the Mindful Shade Podcast. I'm Paula Parker, and I'm a life and weight loss coach. So today we're going to be talking about weighing yourself on the scale, why you might want to, why you might be reluctant to do it, and everything that comes up with what I call scale drama. Having been Mental drama about getting on the scale.

So if you've ever dreaded getting on the scale if you avoided it until you've You know gotten back on track. So say you've overeaten and then you find ah, you're gonna skip it and not get on today You're just gonna wait a few days. All right, or you decided that you know what? I'm just gonna see how I feel in my clothes.

I'm gonna see how I look in the mirror not going to get on the scale at all. If any of that, if you've experienced any of that, you're just, you're not alone. Okay. I've heard it so many times and I've experienced it myself. Often we jump right on the scale or decide that we're going to use it on our weight loss journey to monitor our progress without ever thinking about how we are going to manage our minds.

Then it becomes something that we end up using against ourselves and it can have a negative impact on our weight loss. So in today's episode, I'm going to be offering a reframe or a few reframes when it comes to the scale so that it's a tool that serves you versus something that triggers a negativity spiral.

And my goal for this episode is that you will not only get on the scale tomorrow morning, but no matter what. Number is on there. You will not let it ruin your day. Instead, you will have the tools to be able to use it as an opportunity to call your power back. And yes, I just said, call your power back because you know, I am in the self help space after all.

Okay. So I, I can say that. Okay. So there are a number of reasons I think weighing yourself every day. is useful. Okay. So number one, it's a pretty reliable indication of your progress over time. Now note the nuance here. It's only one indication of your progress. It's not the whole story of course, but we know that if you start at one 90 on day one and You know, six months later, you're at 160, you've made some progress, right?

It's very specific, measurable. Number two is weighing daily rather than weekly is also going to be more beneficial in that it will show you how your body releases weight. So some bodies, are more gradual, some, uh, hold on to weight and then suddenly drop it. Some bodies release a pound, then they go back up and then they normalize at that lower weight.

So if you're weighing less than daily, then you don't have an accurate picture of how your body releases weight. So it's really helpful to know your body's patterns so that you know what to expect. Also, you'll want to know your range, okay? So instead of getting really hung up on one specific number, know that it's very normal for your weight to fluctuate.

And that's going to be individual based on, you know, your body's level of water retention, inflammation, your general health. Age your constitution, right? So usually it's a range of about three to four pounds, but even that is just an average, it can be less or more when you're weighing yourself every day.

You will know what is a normal range for you. Again, this is going to help us when it goes up. We can just say, okay, is this in the range? It's probably due to water retention, that kind of thing. Okay. So. It also helps us learn to manage our thoughts around the scale so it can serve as a useful tool rather than a damaging one or just something that we avoid, right?

So I'm going to talk a lot about this in this episode, so we'll just put a pin in that for now. And then of course, you know, when we're using it as a tool, we're using it as information, we're using it as data. When we have that data of, you know, Are we releasing weight or not? Then we can use that to know whether we need to change up what we're doing if we need to change up our protocol.

So we've been following a protocol for at least three to four weeks and we've been following it 90 percent of the time and there's been zero change. In your weight, then you might want to consider making a change, but if you reflect and you're thinking, okay, well, you know what, I really haven't been sticking to my protocol in the last three to four weeks, not, you know, 90 to a hundred percent, then stick it out for another three weeks and then see if anything changes.

And then lastly, you know, Research shows that what we measure improves. So when you know that you're going to get on the scale the next day, it may have a positive influence on the choices that you make in the moment. Okay. So, and I know that like getting on the scale can really suck. And so I want to support you in that, whether you've been avoiding it.

But suspect you really should get on just to see what that number is. Get a starting point. Or if you're weighing yourself pretty regularly with a lot of negative emotion, when it either stays the same or if it even goes up, the reason why it sucks so bad is because we are giving that number so much power or making it mean a whole bunch of things.

So if you look around you right now. And think of weighing things on a scale, maybe your dishes, if you're doing the dishes or the leash in your hand, if you're walking your dog right now, whatever it is, you will have zero drama about weighing that thing. And you can think of little kids too, right? Like my son, it's funny when he, there was a while there where he would wake up in the morning and like get on the scale because he must've just seen me do it.

And so he has zero drama, he's three. So we zero drama about getting on the scale. It's a very fun thing for him to do. How can this be right? Of course it's because he has no emotional charge to what he's making that mean that information pretty much means nothing to him, right? But when we get on, we put our bodies on the scale.

We don't make it mean nothing. We make that number mean things like we're failing. We're too fat. We're, um, never going to lose the weight. We're pathetic. What we're doing isn't working or it's not working fast enough. Oftentimes it feels like this is not fair. We are entitled to weight loss because we've been doing all the things.

We've been working out or we've been eating healthy and it should reflect on the scale. We will think sometimes like, oh, this is hopeless. Like what's the point? Or we've let ourselves go or we're so far gone that it's going to be really hard to get back down. Right? So maybe your weight's gone up. And so of course you don't want to get on the scale.

If that's where your brain is going, right? If that is what's waiting for you after you weigh yourself, then your brain is going to want to protect you from that. And it's going to avoid getting on the scale. So just imagine if every time you opened a window, there was a person right there who told you all of those things, you're a failure.

You're never going to get this sorted out. You shouldn't have eaten all of those things, all of that. You would never open that window. And yet. We get on the scale, and we let our brains tell us all of those things without ever questioning one, whether they're true, or B, whether they are helping us move toward what we want, or they're actually holding us back.

And instead of learning how to change, These thoughts, we simply stop weighing ourselves. We avoid the scale. And what else is sometimes then we even overeat to help us feel better about all of the defeat and hopelessness that we're experiencing after seeing that number. And then of course, we're even further than we want to be in terms of our weight.

So I remember years and years ago, getting on the scale, the doctor's office and a nurse weighed me and. He, he told me the number and it was 10 pounds over what I thought I weighed. I wasn't weighing myself every day, obviously, but the 10 pounds. So that's a pretty big difference, right? I definitely spiraled.

So I vowed to start working out more. I vowed to eat less. Of course, after a day of just eating anything and as much as I wanted, of course, right? Because there's going to be heavy restriction in the following weeks. So instead of doing that sort of thing, here's what I'm suggesting. Bye. We learn how to manage our thoughts about that number on the scale and what it means.

So here's how to do that in four ways. First, know that what we're truly interested in is not actually weight loss. It's fat loss. When we get on the scale, we can't account for all the variables that affect our weight. Now, intellectually, we know that our weight varies, but when you get on that scale, and then you see the number goes up, it's like we forget that.

It's like we have amnesia. We just forget that, right? So don't do that. Remember the next time you get on the scale, it's probably water retention. Okay? That's why the scale is up. It's unlikely that you've gained like two to three pounds of fat overnight, but it's funny how we can still let ourselves get bummed out, right?

When we see that number go up. So just watch for that. Whenever you eat salt or carbohydrates, even if it's vegetables, that's going to affect how much water your body holds onto. So I know that if I eat sushi with soy sauce, my weight is going to go up the next day, but who cares, right? We're not looking at that.

We're not looking at weight gain. We're looking at fat gain. That's what matters. So as long as you are still in that three to four pound range, don't let it get to you. Okay? Sometimes people attribute their weight loss success to eating low carb, but what we know is that that's not fat loss. That's water loss.

Okay? So the number on the scale fluctuates dramatically throughout the day. And at different times. So if you're trying to be more accurate in terms of data collection, try to weigh yourself at around the same time every day, and as an experiment, just jump on the scale a few times in one day to just see what your brain does.

So like at the end of the day. Jump on before you go to sleep could be very interesting just to see what happens. It's kind of like exposure therapy. It's like what they do with people who have arachnophobia. They keep forcing them to be with spiders and eventually their brain learns it can handle it.

And the fear goes away. I have to do this with heights because if I don't literally climb on the jungle gym and the playground where my son, where we take my son and my daughter now, um, but he's on there, he's playing around, like goes up on the big slide and all of that. If I don't go up there, like if there's a long time that passes where I don't go up there.

My fear of heights is like debilitating. So I have to regularly just go up there so that I'm exposed to it. And it becomes less of a fear, but if I don't do it, that fear comes back. So you can do the same thing with the scale so that your brain really gets used to getting on there, seeing a number and not making it mean something terrible.

Okay. I really encourage you, especially if you have a lot of scale drama to try this exercise, even if you just do it for one day. Okay. Okay. Number two is no, that fat loss isn't going to happen overnight. So again, we know this intellectually, but it's kind of funny how we can get, you know, so wrapped up in wanting to see the scale go down every single day.

What we can do is just eat healthy for one day and then we get on the scale the next day and expect to see it to drop. But how you're eating today may not show up on the scale until a week from now. So I've heard that fat loss, the fat loss process on our body on average is about four to ten days. And what happens sometimes is that we start eating healthy and stop overeating and then just before we are about to see the fat loss, the excess fat come off our bodies in that process, we get on the scale, we see the number hasn't budged, or maybe it's even gone up.

And then we quit. We say, it's not working. Screw this. We never get to see the results of our efforts. You want to be following the trend lines over weeks, not days, to see if what you're doing is resulting in fat loss. Number three is decide you won't think worse of yourself, no matter what the scale says.

So this requires a little mental prep. So just before you get on, Make that decision. You're not going to feel less about yourself. Okay. This is an option. You are able to do this What if you could really see it as raw data? It's one data point that over time has some information for you for sure about what is necessary for your body To release fat.

That's it It's just one data point. It's helping you build up enough information to make decisions about your protocol. For example, what foods are helping your body release weight. And in which quantities, you know, what foods don't, how much hunger is going to work for your body in terms of releasing fat, how much satiation in terms of the quantities of food.

Okay. Number four is. When you do freak out, have a plan. No surprise here that I'm going to recommend doing even five minutes of some thought work. So if this happens. Invest in yourself, okay? So write out everything that you're experiencing. Even if you do this one time, it's gonna have a huge impact on your experience with the scale.

Write down what you're making that number mean. When you see it on paper, you'll also see how it's contributing to how you feel. Nothing's going wrong here, but at least you can now decide what you want to think on purpose. And even if your brain's like, well, it's really true that that number is too high.

That's okay. I'm not suggesting that you even try changing that thought, but you can also decide you're not going to let that number determine how you treat yourself today. You can think, okay, that number is too high. I don't like that number. That number sucks. And I can feel crappy about it without.

Having to soothe myself with over eating, over anything on that day. This is how we can start bringing a mindfulness piece into shifting things just enough to start changing your patterns. Eventually, with enough practice, this is what prevents you from just quitting and what guarantees your success over the long term.

So this is true whether you have five pounds to release or 150. And I know a lot of programs out there will say, don't weigh yourself. It's not good for your mental health, but that's only for people who don't know how to manage their mind, who don't even know that's available to them. When you know how to manage your mind.

You know where your brain is most likely to go down a negativity spiral, right? And you know how to think about it that keeps you from going down that spiral. Then you get two benefits. One, you get the biggest, which is confidence in your own ability of, you know, self mastery. And then of course, second, as a bonus, you get another tool for your weight loss, right?

You get to measure your progress by using the scale. That scale has zero power in making you feel any kind of way. Seriously. You can decide this is data. What can it tell me? What information? It's here. You can say, I refuse to let this piece of plastic and batteries determine how I feel. And Hey, if you step on the scale and you start feeling lousy, you can say it out loud like a real weirdo.

I call my power back. So will you do it? Will you get on the scale tomorrow so that you know where you are in terms of your weight loss journey? Okay? You can do it. You can manage your mind. Use the tools I talked about today. And if you do it, if you're up for the challenge, send me a DM, a message on Instagram, and let me know if anything shifted for you in terms of your experience with the scale.

I would love to hear your story. Okay. I'll talk to you soon. Bye