Scales: a Blessing and a Curse

Having a scale is one of the most important tools in dieting. It is however a double-edged sword. It’s an easy gate towards an eating disorder – and it can very easily make an eating disorder worse. A scale can also be outright misleading. If improperly calibrated, the results a scale gives you are completely meaningless and worthless. So why get one? That’s the point of this article!

Having a scale has many advantages. It’s a requirement for charting your weight, which is quite possibly the greatest advantage. Charting your weight is the basis of any diet – why eat different if there are no results? Really though some of the coolest features found in scales are the additional features. Some have cool things like BMI indices or fat analyzers built in too. These extra features help greatly in many diets, especially ones based I exercise. The BMI index helps you see if you’re in a healthy range – which can help you gauge how severely you need to diet. The most useful feature though is a fat analyzer. Granted, there are many accuracy problems with fat analyzers – for example, dehydration has huge effects on the reading. But a risk of many diets is losing weight not by losing fat but by losing muscle (you can gain fat and lose muscle and still lose weight – muscle weighs more than fat). The analyzer means that if this starts you can quickly act to remedy your diet.

So what are the disadvantages? Unfortunately there’s a decent amount. Having a scale handy makes it very, very easy to obsess over your weight. Obsessing ratchets up your stress. This stress causes you to retain weight, causing you to obsess more. It quickly becomes a vicious cycle which can make you spiral out of control. It’s also altogether too easy to go from this state to having an eating disorder. Of course this is something we all want to avoid – it’s the other unhealthy end of the spectrum, the opposite being obese.

So what should you do? Well, my recommendation is to buy a scale. If properly used, there are only benefits. I recommend first a digital scale – they are generally more accurate, and some are even self-calibrating. If you find an affordable one with the options I mentioned before, you should strongly consider getting it. As for how to avoid the adverse effects of the scale, limit yourself to checking your weight a maximum of once daily. This way you can effectively chart your weight loss while avoiding the potential adverse effects. Probably your best choice for a scale will can be found in a place like Walmart. You can check more specialized stores for scales with other features, but often prices will be higher. And if you know more additional features you want to tell me about, feel free!