Category — weight

Rainbow On Your Plate has been devoted to pieces that reflect healthy eating and living.  I think it’s time I talked about our relationship with weight.

Once upon a time, PK (pre-kids), I was in private practice providing psychotherapy to eating disorder patients.  I worked with primarily women who were struggling with anorexia, bulimia and/or compulsive binge eating disorder.  It occurs to me that a technique we used during weigh-in’s is a tool I seem to implement on myself even now.

Recently, I visited my doc for my annual physical.  Of course, the beginning of a standard visit includes, among other assessments, stepping on to the scale.  Ever since those days when I worked in the hospital, when getting my own check-up I step onto the scale, turn my back to it and ask that the nurse not share the number with me.

Weigh-in’s were an excruciatingly stressful time for my patients.  I figured out early on that learning the digits on that scale NEVER helped these young women ease their eating disorder symptoms.  If the number was higher than they expected, they predictably experienced intolerable anxiety and their symptoms worsened – and the number on that scale would go down even further.  If the number was lower than they expected, they would experience a blissful euphoria and feel unable to control their desire to maintain that downward momentum, and the number on that scale would go down.  There was no winning when it came to knowing the number.

So – my odd behavior.  Do I fear that hearing the series of digits coming from the nurse’s mouth will have some terribly uncomfortable impact on me?  I’m not sure.  What I do know is that my mood (or relationship with my body) doesn’t change from day to day because of the result of a scale-stepping ritual.

There are so many ways to find comfort in our bodies and all that they can do.  It would be a shame to decide that a little machine on the bathroom floor could dictate it for us.