What I Learned From Ditching My Scale

So admittedly I’ve kept a weight scale around for far too long.  It’s been something that you always think belongs in the house and you aren’t even sure why.  My parents always had a scale in our bathroom at home and it seemed like every bathroom just had to have one.  It was almost as if it was the sole indicator of a person’s meaning and purpose. So through my transition into adulthood and eventually into a home with my husband...there its been sitting on the floor.  And it got way too much use.  Sadly I didn’t think too much about the scale...well I didn’t think much about why my husband and I still had it in our home.  My weight had always stayed pretty steady, not even changing much after high school. I didn’t see the horrible effects of the scale until my husband and I became pregnant with our first child.  During my first trimester I lost 10 pounds because I couldn’t eat anything.  The number on the scale was starting to worry me.  I didn’t know whether my daughter was getting the proper nutrition.  By the end of my pregnancy I didn’t need to worry.  I put on the normal amount of pregnancy weight.  At my last doctors appointment...I did what I always did.  Jumped on that awful scale.  I now weighed as much as my husband.  I broke down in the room with my husband. Most of it can be chalked up to pregnancy hormones.  Weighing as much as a trim 6” male was still hard to swallow.  Everything seemed to settle down after I returned to working out and the weight slowly came off.  And then one day my daughter came into the bathroom as I was weighing myself and took a big interest in the “E” and the “O” on the scale.  And at that moment I was more worried than I had ever been in my life.  Was I condemning my daughter to being obsessed with her own weight? I decided to put the scale in the bathroom cabinet so my daughter would forget about it.  She didn’t.  I still thought about it.  As much as I wished that I didn’t.  Then came the amazing day that it simply stopped working.  It was such a huge weight that fell off my shoulders.  I was finally able to really concentrated on how I felt in my own skin rather than what the number on the scale said.  My happiness wasn’t dependent on whether I’d lost or gained weight. Beyond the benefits of not raising my daughter with a scale in the house I had finally come to realize how tied down I was to society’s definition of beauty and how much it is tied to a number.  On a scale, on clothing, or on a food box.  There is nothing so constricting as conforming to someone else’s definition of what is beautiful and what deems your worth.

Rachael is definitely an Inspirational BodyRocker, and her story is actually featured in our newest book! Click Here to find out how BodyRock helped Rachael and so many others on their weight loss & fitness journey.