The scale and I have reached detente. That is: I leave it alone, and it affords me the same courtesy. I rarely step on it, and we’re both better off.
I have earned the right of refusal. As someone who weighed herself almost daily between the ages of 10 and 25, who spent six years at fat camps and traveled around the Middle East with a scale buried in the pit of her backpack (I know, I know …), I’ve done my time.
I won’t even weigh myself at the doctor’s office. Nothing good can come from the knowledge that I’m 3 pounds lighter, or 2 pounds heavier.
“People are obsessed with it - they go crazy over a tenth of a pound,” said Jim White, a registered dietitian nutritionist and a spokesman for the Academy of Nutrition and Dietetics. “I’ve had clients who are losing major inches and body fat and looking and feeling great, but if the scale doesn’t budge they get defeated.
The number defines them.”
I had pretty much been blessedly scale-free until a few months ago, when I signed up for a month of twice-weekly fitness classes. Shedding pounds was not my goal. I just wanted a good, hard workout. The instructor insisted on taking our “before” and “after” measurements,including our weight and body fat percentages.
I balked, but after the teacher promised “I won’t tell you what it is,” I held my breath and shuffled onto the scale as if to the guillotine. I was curious, of course, but I squeezed my eyes shut and didn’t peek.
And that was the end of that until a week later, when I opened a group email from her and found a list of the entire class, along with our weights and measurements.
A ball of rubber bands wove its way from my stomach and lodged in my throat. “Really?” I thought.
It seemed a major violation.
So many of us can recite the intimate details of our friends’ sex lives, their pharmacological habits, their rents. But question their weights, and their mouths clamp shut. Not even the National Security Agency knows that.
“How often do we ask someone what they weigh? Unless you really know them well, you don’t,” said Allan Geliebter, a senior researcher at the New York Obesity Nutrition Research Center at St. Luke’s-Roosevelt Hospital Center. “The last thing you tell someone is that they gained a lot of weight.”
After stewing about it, I realized that I didn’t really care if 15 strangers knew my weight. I just didn’t want to know - especially since it was about 5 pounds higher than I would have liked. It haunted me.
The teacher apologized. But, she said, the weight was “just a number.”
“The real thing you should worry about is body fat,” she said.
Indeed, most experts agree that body fat percentage is a better indicator of health than overall weight, with obesity often defined as greater than 25 percent body fat in men and 35 percent in women.
Belly, or visceral, fat can be more harmful than the subcutaneous fat found directly under the skin and stored in the thighs and derriere - neither of which a traditional scale gauges.
WHAT’S BEING WEIGHED?
“Weight, in itself, is an imperfect measurement of health,” said Dr. Philip Schauer, director of the Cleveland Clinic Bariatric and Metabolic Institute.
“Someone who is 30 pounds overweight and has mainly a pear shape can be pretty healthy.
You can be an apple shape and 30 pounds overweight and have diabetes.”
A quicker and more accurate assessment, he said, is measuring waist circumference - more than 35 inches for women or more than 40 inches for men is evidence of problems - or using calipers to determine the amount of fat under the skin. Those measurements tend to be more reliable than body mass index, or BMI, which doesn’t distinguish between fatty and lean tissue or take body shape into consideration.
ON THE OTHER HAND
So if the scale is such a flawed measure, why is it still so widely used?
“It can be an effective tool,” said Jennifer Linde, an associate professor of epidemiology at the University of Minnesota Twin Cities, in Minneapolis. “It gives you feedback every day, and you can coach people to look at the number as a neutral thing. It doesn’t have to be a value judgment.”
Presuming it is possible to look at it as a “neutral” thing, some studies have shown that the more frequently you weigh the better off you are, at least in terms of weight control. A six-month study of overweight and obese adults who were looking to lose weight, published in September by the journal Obesity, confirmed that sentiment.
During the study, which included a mobile scale for daily weighing, a web-based weight loss graph and weekly feedback from researchers, participants who weighed themselves daily lost 13 pounds on average. Those in the other group, who weighed themselves weekly, lost nothing.
David A. Levitsky, a professor of nutrition and psychology at Cornell University who has conducted studies on the efficacy of daily weighing since 1992, believes that daily self-weighing is necessary to help prevent weight gain.
“I don’t see any way that we are going to tax fats or tax soda or have people exercise more in order to control their weight,” he said.
“There’s enough data to show that doesn’t work. But if you step on that scale first thing in the morning, that’s protective [against] those subtle cues in our environment that make us eat a little more than we expend.”JUST PAY ATTENTION
The best news, at least for scale avoiders, is that most medical professionals agree that self-monitoring - whether it is counting calories, writing down how much one eats or weighing oneself regularly - is the greatest predictor of success. Our task is to choose the thing that makes us the least crazy, and stick with it.
And that is why, in the end, I skipped getting weighed at my last exercise class. There was no reason to. I felt stronger, my clothes fit better, and that was enough for me.
ActiveStyle, Pages 25 on 02/17/2014