Do you feel compelled to weigh yourself all the time because you’re heavier than you want to be? Are you sick and tired of having your scale tell you how you’re entitled to feel and what kind of day you’re going to have? Your scale isn’t your horoscope. And it’s high time you reclaimed your power over this miserable piece of scrap metal. Find out why your scale could be serving you up an extra side of sabotage.
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Do you cringe every morning when you go into the bathroom and look down at your scale? Do you feel compelled to weigh yourself daily, or do you torture yourself several times during the course of each day?
You’re so not alone in doing this.
A lot of people use the scale in an attempt to make themselves feel good. But unfortunately whether you know it or not, the scale could be doing you more harm than good.
No doubt about it. Scale hopping promotes stress and creates feelings of obsession around food and your weight, which keeps you resenting and hating your body. When you get on the scale and you don’t see the result you want, you feel badly about yourself. That’s often when your stress levels rises and your body craves food in order to feel better.
My Scale Hopping Experience
As I shared in my book, “Lovin‘ the Skin You’re In, “when I was a dieter, I used to play the scale hopping game all the time. http://andreaamadorcoaching.com/product.php?id=147
Each day I would make a habit of getting on and off my bathroom scale in various states of dress and undress, before/after meals, and dare I say it, after each time I went to the bathroom. It drove me nuts! My constant scale hopping was like playing the lottery. Every day I would climb on the scale wishing and hoping for a lower number and no matter how much I swore to myself it wouldn’t affect my mood, it always did.
If my weight was down, it gave me unconscious permission to eat in celebration. If my weight was up, the pangs of guilt from overeating would put the squeeze on me to slim down, which increased my stress level. Depending upon which way it went, I either begrudgingly recommitted back to losing weight by tightening the belt and depriving myself more of the foods I loved or seeing a weight gain would often be enough to send me screaming like a banshee to the kitchen to dive headfirst into the nearest container of Ben and Jerry’s mint oreo cookie ice cream. Yet I never understood how the scale sabotaged me until I started to research what is known as the mind body connection. That’s when I started to change many of my weight watching habits and began to learn how to live, eat and think like a naturally slender woman.
The Mind Body Connection
Your thoughts are insanely powerful. Depending upon what you think about each day, you are either creating what you want or everything you don’t.
Dr. Nancy Bonios is the creator of the Beyond Dieting Program, a non-diet weight control regimen that teaches the importance of changing your thoughts and behaviors to reshape your body. Dr Bonios says that “as a dieter, your mind is issuing all the wrong commands instructing your body to stay focused on everything you don’t want. If you’re always worrying about your weight, you’ll keep gaining more.
It’s no secret that diets don’t work and with research showing that up to 98% of all diets fail, it’s confirmation that the route of deprivation doesn’t work. Most people who have spent years dieting have developed negative feelings and self-images. Your self-image is the picture that you have of yourself in your mind’s eye, which determines what you are willing to do and what you believe to be possible.
Are you tired of feeling enslaved by your insecurities? Terrified at the prospect of going sleeveless, putting on a pair of shorts, wearing a swimsuit out in public? Would you rather die than bare your thighs? You’re so not alone. I used to feel the same way until I learned how to transform my doubts, fears and negative emotions into confidence. Now I teach my clients how to do the same and they love it.
Recently I coached a woman who we’ll call Ann. She was very angry with herself because she had gained a lot of weight during her separation from her husband. She was beating up on herself because she reasoned that she deserved the way she felt.
When I asked her what she wanted, she knew that it was important to her to get healthier, and lose weight but the idea of actually cooking at home rather than hitting the drive-thru or going back to the gym to take a class was so overwhelming that she couldn’t imagine making the change. It was just too scary.
When I asked her to think about the smallest possible action that she could take to move closer to getting healthier, she said that she really wanted to go back to the gym. And she’d be really proud of herself if she could just break through her resistance and make a phone call to inquire about their schedule of classes. That’s what she really wanted.
As I teach my clients, the stress relief method known as tapping is very effective in being able to shut down your body’s stress response and that makes it possible to think clearly again so that you can see more possibilities.
Before we began tapping, I did some digging to get to the bottom of what Ann was really worried about. Ann was saying how she was really anxious about fearing other people’s judgment and worrying about not being able to keep up with the workouts in the classes. She didn’t want to feel like people were judging her and watching her, saying she was fat.
After a few minutes of tapping, she was pretty jazzed about calling the gym and getting the schedule of classes. She had a complete change in thinking.
What’s something that you want, that you feel conflicted about? I’d like to help you to take those next steps. Let me show you how you can transform your negative thoughts and feeling of body shame to feeling sassy.
This week on my Sexy At Every Size call, we’ll be talking about how you can take your power back from the scale.
http://andreaamadorcoaching.com/1.php?page=Sexy_At_Every_Size
Here’s something that you really need to know so that you can stop beating up on yourself. When you don’t do something that you say that you want, it’s not because you’re bad, or stupid or lazy. It’s none of those things. We don’t do many of the things we say that we want, because we’re afraid of moving past what we know. Change is scary. Your resistance really just comes down to being afraid of leaving a comfort zone. As I teach my clients, when you use the tapping to release your fears, you’re able to do what you want easily and effortlessly.
I want to help you to take baby steps towards loving your body more. A big part of that is to teach you how to relax and enjoy the process so that you won’t feel so much pressure to change before you’re ready.
Climbing on a scale will only light up your fat circuit board and keep you stuck in the old rut of thinking like a fat person. To break out of that fat trap,
Here are several practical reasons why you must stop weight watching and scale hopping:
Scales don’t’ always measure progress Perhaps the most upsetting part of weighing yourself is that the number on the scale does not accurately measure your progress. Scales only measure the pull of gravity on mass. It doesn’t accurately show the size or density of the mass it’s measuring. A pound of feathers and a pound of lead both weigh the same but the pound of feathers takes up a large amount of space and enough volume to fill an entire pillow case. A pound of lead can fit easily in the palm of your hand. The truth is you may only need to lose a relatively small amount of weight to get down to your ideal size. I don’t know why this is so but it is. In the Beyond Dieting Program Dr. Nancy Bonios recounts a story sharing her experience saying, “I personally went down from a size 13/14 down to a 5/6 and in the process, I only lost 10 pounds.
Weight fluctuates It’s natural for your weight to go up and down all the time. It can vary as much as ten pounds up or down, depending upon time of month, water retention, hormones, environmental factors and even atmospheric pressure.
Scale Stress Weighing yourself is a common form of self sabotage since it is a way of creating stress in your body, which hooks you right back into the diet mentality, giving you a constant reminder that you’re still overweight and making you feel helpless. This powerful emotional message “I’m fat” overrides any progress that you’ve been making in attempting to change your thoughts.
Tap into your body’s wisdom Naturally slim people never weigh themselves and therefore probably have no idea of their weight. This is because they don’t rely on an external authority to tell them how to control their eating. They have a peaceful, balanced and healthy relationship with food and they are guided to eat by listening to their bodies.
Take it easy. Change is never easy. To avoid the natural resistance that comes with wanting to make any change in your life, it’s best to be as gentle as possible with yourself. By getting on the scale, you create unnecessary stress and tension and sabotage your progress. Dr. Bonios says, “permanent change requires a climate of love and nurturing, not self loathing and disgust. Take my advice, and step away from the scale.
Have you been in a power struggle with your bathroom scale? I want to teach you how to get out of scale jail. If you liked this post, then you’ll love the support that comes with being a member. Click the image below to join the 30 Days to Lovin’ the Skin You’re In FB group:
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Andrea Amador, The Juicy Woman, scale jail, fat, weight obsession, emotional eating, Lovin’ the Skin You’re In,