The Best Thing You Can Do for Your Body Before Summer Starts? Break Up with The Scale

Guess what? Weighing yourself is (kind of) pointless. Yep— it’s true. Unless you have been explicitly, medically advised to track your weight with a scale (like, if you’ve been told to gain or lose weight for some reason, by a medical professional ONLY), weighing yourself is actually mostly pointless and, since adults’ body weight fluctuates around 5 pounds or so per day (depending on water retention, hormones, etc.), it will likely only lead to confusion and upset. All that said, the best thing you can do for your body this summer is break up with the scale, and love yourself unconditionally. Let’s talk through this some more—

Breaking up with the scale: why you should, and more effective ways to measure fitness progress

Did you know that the average adult’s weight fluctuates about 5 pounds a day? Yep. Depending on what you ate yesterday, how much you moved, what your cells and hormones (and other things beyond your control) are up to etc., your weight can be largely unpredictable within a 5 pound range and it’s actually very hard to understand when you’ve gained or lost weight in the longer-term by simply weighing yourself alone.

Weighing yourself can be triggering for this reason (at worst), and confusing (at best). It can make you feel like your self-worth is tied to a number (it’s not!— or, it shouldn’t be, at least), like you’re not making progress (because the arbitrary number on the scale changed), and a slew of other negative, confusing thoughts and emotions that can taint your body image.

If you truly want to measure fitness progression, just take stock of how you feel, or, in more extreme cases, take simple measurements of your body. Feel how your clothes fit on your body. Look at yourself in the mirror— your body composition means much more than the number on the scale ever could, and if you feel good and you’re in good health, it is in really no way helpful to obsess over the scale every day (or even every week, or month).

So, this summer (as we start to micro-analyze our bodies in bikinis, etc.), the best thing you can do for yourself is break up with the scale. Throw it out (unless you medically need it, which most people don’t), put it away, and just don’t sweat the number on the scale. If you feel good and healthy, that is enough. You are enough. Your body is beautiful and remember, ALL bodies are summer bodies.

TL;DR? Weight is just a number and, actually, doesn’t tell you much about health— so stop sweating it, and flaunt that bikini, y’all.

Xoxo, MM.