I frequent the Weight Watchers message board, and I am CONSTANTLY seeing women posting about how they exercised and gained weight. Other women's posts, which frustrate me even more, go on about how they're afraid to even start exercising, because they're terrified about seeing the scale go up.

In my mind, this whole fixation on the bathroom scale began with the BMI (Body Mass Index). Based on your height and weight, it gives you a number that tells you how healthy you are. How can a chart of NUMBERS tell you how healthy or unhealthy you are? It can't tell you that you inherited your family's large bone structure, and it can't tell you that you have a lot of muscle (which is heavier than fat). The BMI tries to fit us all into very narrow categories, and WE CAN'T BE CATEGORIZED. Society's not helping either. Between all the skinny models on magazines (who look disgusting, if you ask me), and the political struggle going on with something as simple as a food pyramid, it's hard to know exactly what we're supposed to be striving for.

I'm not saying you should throw your scale out the window. But for heaven's sake, stop depending on the thing as though your life depended on it! If you gain weight through exercise, GOOD. You're not gaining fat, you're gaining muscle. You could get as skinny as you want, but without firming, you're just going to look like a smaller overweight person. Those muscles aren't going to tone themselves through a diet. And that skin isn't going to magically just stretch back into place. You'll be skinny, but you'll be sagging everywhere. Stop fixating on weight, and start thinking about fitness.

I wish that we could focus on that, instead of our weight. Health people keep trying to pretend that this whole campaign of theirs revolves around health, but they're so fixated on telling us we're too fat, and they don't focus enough on the important stuff. So no wonder all these diet fads like TrimSpa and CortiSlim and all those other things make such a killing; we're not being told to get healthy, we're being told to get thin.

I'm a little scared of losing all my curves, to be honest. I don't want to slim down to a bunch of angles and hard lines. The models I see on magazines and in commercials have enviably flat tummies, sure, but do you see the way their hips just pop out like starving cattle? (Seriously, look at a photo of a cow and watch the way their hips jut out.) I'm proud of my femininity, and no SCALE is going to tell me that I need to lose all those soft curves.

So anyway, I really hope I didn't come across as sounding preachy, because I don't mean to. We're ALL programmed to obsess over our weight, so I'm not trying to blame anyone or act as though I don't care at all about those numbers (because even though I fight it, there ARE days--especially on my weigh-in day--when I worry about what the scale will tell me). I joined Weight Watchers as a way to help me keep track of the foods I'm putting in my mouth, and I started with The FIRM because I needed a steady source of exercise. I don't even measure myself more than once a month, and the scale is just there as an extra motivator...though if it doesn't move one week, I don't stress out. Try to make this a fitness journey, not just a weight loss journey. We need to be HEALTHY, not skinny and frail and reedy-looking. ;)

Want an in-depth explanation? Check out this link!
http://www.primusweb.com/fitnesspartner/library/weight/scale.htm

*steps off soapbox*