Some people feel compelled to weigh themselves daily, maybe only once every morning or several times during the course of each day. They may do it in an attempt to make themselves feel good or whether they know it or not, they often do it as an act of sabotage making themselves feel bad. That behavior promotes stress and creates feelings of obsession around food and your weight, which keeps you resenting and hating your body. When you feel badly about yourself, a binge is usually just around the corner.

My Scale Hopping Experience

When I was a dieter, I used to play the scale game all the time. 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

There is a connection between your mind and body that can either make you sick or keep you well. Your thoughts can either make you fat or thin. The choice is yours! 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 as you learn to eat whatever you want in response to your physical hunger. Dr Bonios says that as a dieter your mind is issuing all the wrong commands instructing your body to do what you don’t want; stay fat. Constantly monitoring your weight on the scale keeps you thinking like a fat person and you can’t be thin if you’re thinking fat. It is a constant reminder that you’re still fat.

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 that determines what you are willing to do. It works much like a thermostat, in that it keeps you within a certain comfort zone. This ultimately determines your success in every area of your life.

In order to break the mold and effectively change your negative and dis-empowering beliefs about food and your body, you have to develop new habits that will lead to generating behaviors that make you feel safe around food and at ease with your body.

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 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.