Does stepping on the scale every day mess with your emotions? If the number has gone down, you’re filled with glee. But if the number went up, the entire day starts to revolve around food…
Weighing yourself daily tends to perpetuate food obsession. And obsessing over our diet and restricting the foods we enjoy actually results in rebellious binges.
There’s a much better way to reach your natural weight, and I talk about those steps in other blog posts. Today we’re focusing on one helpful step: crushing the daily weigh-in habit. It’s not serving any of us.
If you’re new, this is the home of Psycho-Spiritual Wellness: a path to stop overeating rooted in psychology and spirituality, not dieting. Let’s dig in!
Why You Should Stop Weighing Yourself Every Day
I know how difficult it can be to break the daily weigh-in habit. So I’ve created this list of friendly reminders of why it’s a great idea to put the scale away.
1. You might find it a little easier to stop overeating
Skipping the weigh-in won’t directly help you stop overeating, but! It helps clear the negative mental chatter that makes it even more difficult to stop overeating.
Psycho-Spiritual Wellness involves tuning into the emotions that drive compulsive eating, and dealing with that instead of the scale and diet stuff.
It’s about listening to your body to inform what and when to eat.
This requires intuition, which is a right-brained skill. Paying attention to numbers on the scale is a left-brained skill, and it just gets in the way.
Giving up the daily weigh-in helps calm the mental chatter so that you can get back in touch with your body’s natural rhythms. Woo hoo!
2. You’ll get off the emotional roller coaster
The emotions that drive compulsive eating are already tough enough to deal with.
When you add the let-down associated with a disappointing weigh-in, you’re only making things harder on yourself.
You have enough to deal with already! Give yourself a break from the constant ups and downs of weighing yourself everyday.
Bonus: If you can pour your energy into a tool that actually helps you stop overeating (like the Stop, Drop, & Feel), then you’ll be in even better shape.
3. Your body image will improve
When you stop weighing yourself everyday, your internal dialogue will shift.
You’ll stop obsessively thinking, “Why did my weight go up two whole pounds from yesterday?!” Instead, your mind will move onto other things.
And when you stop beating yourself up on a daily basis, your body image is bound to improve.
When you take away the thing that makes you feel like crud (that nasty mental chatter), you stop feeling like crud. (Yep, I’m oversimplifying, but you get my point!)
4. You’ll have no choice but to embrace intuition — thank goodness!
When you’re obsessed with your numerical weight, you’re operating out of fear. You want to know exactly where you stand so that you can behave accordingly.
But it’s not helpful to eat by the numbers. Years and years of failed attempts at dieting has taught us that.
It works much better to eat based on intuition. Listen to your hunger, your fullness, and your desire to fuel your body with nutritious foods — and sometimes not!
The bottom line is that if you’re following the Psycho-Spiritual Wellness Eating Guidelines, listening to your body, and honoring what it needs from you, then there’s no reason to know how much you weigh.
5. You’ll be forced to practice the skill that actually helps stabilize your weight
Your feelings are the seat of intuition. The more emotional awareness you develop, the more your intuition sharpens.
But what if you want to reach your natural weight? Where does intuition fit into that? The answer is, emotional tolerance.
When you practice allowing yourself to feel uncomfortable, you’ll get better at feeling awful without resorting to food to numb the pain. This is the core philosophy of Psycho-Spiritual Wellness — and this is how we address the root cause of overeating.
Whenever there’s a desire to eat when you aren’t hungry, it’s because there’s a feeling that you don’t want to feel (like anxiety, depression, boredom).
By embracing these emotions, instead of turning to food, we can stop overeating long-term.
It’s the opposite of a diet. Instead of focusing on the surface level of food, we’re actually digging into the psychological cause of overeating.
And the sooner we stop weighing ourselves, the sooner we can clear the unnecessary mental chatter and dig into this essential work!
Ditch the Scale!
Giving up the scale-watching habit is essential for overcoming food obsession and giving yourself a little grace.
I recommend taking all the energy wasted on dieting and scale-watching and redirecting it to Feeling Your Feelings instead.
This is a worthwhile pursuit that actually helps you develop the right skill for developing a normal relationship with food.
To learn more about Psycho-Spiritual Wellness, check out the free ebook below that explains everything:
Originally posted on December 24, 2017 // Last updated on December 8, 2020
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