One of the hardest things about this journey has been identifying my ‘triggers’.
That set of things, situations and experiences that send me spiraling into addictive behaviors.
And you know why it’s hard?
Because there are so dang many of them. Now that I am looking for them, I can’t stop finding them.
Some are pretty obvious. Like Halloween. 6 weeks of facing bags of candy everywhere I go.
But others are a bit more insidious. In fact, at first glance, some of my triggers disguise themselves as tools. The worst one by far?
The scale.
It’s a cliche to hate the scale, isn’t it? But hate isn’t the right word to describe how I feel about this item. Good Lord it’s so much more than hate.
We have a beautiful glass scale in our bathroom. My husband jumps on it at least 5 times a week. Morning, evening, fully clothed. It makes no difference to him. Early in our marriage (in a moment of horribleness on my part) I snarled “Why don’t you just sing out “Still thin!” every time you get on that thing? It’s a running joke now and I genuinely find it amusing. You see my husband is thin. His weight fluctuates about ten pounds one way or the other no matter what he eats. If he is out of town for a long while eating all the crap food provided to him he may end up toward the top of his zone. Once he is home, that weight literally disappears after a few days of eating the (I’m trying!) decent meals I make for him. The man has never gone more than 3 days without ice cream. He wears workout clothes a few times a week but rarely actually works out. He is ripped with muscles from head to toe. He has huge biceps and glutes and calves that look like he does squats for 3 hours a day.
You know what he doesn’t do?
He doesn’t think about food very often. He eats. He seems to enjoy food. He really does love ice cream. But food is just food to him. When he jumps on the scale, the number he sees does not define him. He is a data junkie. The scale just provides him with more information about himself.
But for me the scale represents decades of joy and pain. I have chained so much memory onto that stupid piece of machinery. There was one in my elementary school gym. We all had to get on it every year. If you were over a certain number, your parents got a letter. My parents got a letter five years in a row. In middle school I escaped the scale because their was no PE class for band kids. (Is it any wonder I am still desperately in love with band?) In high school, after my miraculous 800 calorie a day diet, I weighed every day. I mostly liked the number I saw in those years. Then I went to college and gained the freshman 50 or maybe it was 75. That led to Nutri System. You only had to weigh once a week there. If you lost, it was a celebration and all the credit went to their program. If you gained? Well, you must have been cheating. Hormonal changes, water retention, nope! Those were just excuses. After that other programs followed.
So many…
I once knew a group of women who had ‘weighing’ outfits for Weight Watchers. Their success for the week was determined by the thinness of their clothing. I’m happy to admit I wasn’t one of them. By that time, I had wised up a little bit.
And here I am now. I know so much more about body chemistry and metabolism and so many other things. I know that scale is the least accurate measurement of real progress. And yet I keep getting on it. And stepping on it is still enough to send me head first into a bag of fun sized Snickers. Is it any wonder this process is taking so long?
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