Full Scale Attack

So, today's mission: find and purchase a new scale.

Dieters have a love/hate relationship with their scales. Mostly hate, I think. Fat people love to complain about how the scale is evil, how they are slaves to their scale, etc. Personally I have never had such deep rooted feelings for the scale. It's a tool, one of many in the weight loss arsenal. Obviously it is the ultimate judge of weight loss. Its report is the stark quantification of your progress. You either weigh less than you did last time, or you don't. In that respect, I love the scale.

But there are lots of reasons I don't put too much stock in the scale. For starters, anyone who has done any amount of dieting knows that your body weight fluctuates, sometimes pounds at a time, for a wide range of factors: day of week, time of day, what you're wearing, the impact of your diet and exercise on water retention, etc. Folks who weigh themselves every day are nutso. Day to day readings are not meaningful. What is meaningful is the trend, over time, of your approximate weight (plus or minus a pound or two or three).

And another thing. Except for your doctor and your trainer and physiologists, who cares how much you weigh? Honestly I could care less what I weigh. I am profoundly more interested in how I feel and how I look. Do I feel tired, or energetic? Do my clothes fit me, or am I bursting at the seams? What about my skinny clothes, do they fit me yet? Can I actually remove my shirt at the swimming pool without causing a wave of disgust and terror?

So, that said, I still need a scale. In my view the most important function of the scale is to tell you whether your diet is working or not. Waiting for your pants size to drop takes too long. I need to know week to week whether I'm on track. And for that, I need a scale.

For me, the key factor in selecting a scale is (duh) whether it can tell me my weight. This isn't as easy as it sounds. For one thing I weigh over 300 pounds (egad!). Try poking around at your local stuff mart. The vast majority of scales selling commercially max out at 300 pounds or less. To me this is crazy. While I am certainly massively obese, I am just as certainly not alone. Hello, Earth to scale makers: Americans are fat pigs. We don't need dainty little bathroom scales with glass tops or leopard skin motifs. We need scales that can actually weigh fat people (who, by the way, are probably your most important demographic).

Call me crazy, but another thing I insist on is that my scale tell me my actual weight, not my weight depending on the position of my feet within 10 micrometers or the relative humidity or alignment of the planets. I can't tell you how infuriating it is to use an inaccurate or inconsistent scale. My old gym had this doctor's office style balance beam scale that was only precise within + or - 5 pounds. So one week I'd be 323, then I'd be 318, then up to 322, arrgh!!! Damn you, you trickster scale, how much do I weigh???

So the best I could do was scour the web this morning to see what was for sale at my local retailers, find the ones that could weigh me, and read user reviews to discern what I could about accuracy.

What I came up with was the Weight Watchers Memory Precision Electronic Tracking Scale at Bed Bath and Beyond. This baby weighs up to a beefy 380 pounds, and most of the user reviews I found say it's accurate. Evidently it has some kind of special balancing mechanism that makes it more accurate. We'll see.

I got the scale this morning and excitedly unpacked it and took it for a test drive. First weight check in probably a year. Result: (drum roll please) . . . 326.8 pounds. Fat, to be sure. But not as bad as I thought. Oddly, I've been close to this weight before (actually I think 326 was my weight when I last started with Mike D) -- but my clothes seem way tighter than they used to be. I wonder if, when I regained this weight, it was distributed differently. Hmm. Well, no matter. It's all gotta go, no matter where it is.