Scales of justice

Are your scales doing justice to your weight?

The relationship we have to our weighing instruments is quite often a love-hate one. When we´re losing, we just looove to get on them, when we know we likely have gained...not so.
I, for one, have fought my tendency to gain weight for longer than I care to remember.
The first scales I was weighed on were my parents´, who, being doctors, had a very expensive specimen that might as well have been standing in a doctor´s office, with sliding weights on a balancing beam. So, very exact.
When I moved away from home, I bought myself a cheap bathroom scale, which also had the distinction of fitting underneath my bed. And there it sat, gathering dust.
I gained weight. Just enough so my clothes didn´t fit any more. Out came the scales, now used daily, and a diet plan of powdered diet shakes I clung to religiously, losing about twenty ponds, until the day I fainted in the university library due to the fact that these shakes weren´t made to be eaten exclusively for more than two weeks at a time, so I had gotten myself into quite a nutritient deficit. The product, btw, has been pulled from the shelves long ago.
As soon as I got off that plan, I regained. The scales went under the bed again. I didn´t want to know.

Until the next try, this time with a diet plan that has been popularized by a German magazine. Out came the scales, off went the weight. Off plan went I, on came the weight.
Rinse, wash, repeat.
Whenever I wouldn´t weigh myself regularly, I´d gain weight. 

So, when I was having the weight gain that ended up with me crossing the line to morbid obesity for the first time, I started weighing myself obsessively. And that´s when I discovered that my scales were far from being exact. If I got on them three times in sequence, I´d weigh in at three different weights. Sometimes as far off as two or three pounds.
Not the way to go if one wants exact figures.

So, I went out and bought me...the little brother of this. Sliding weights, a balancing beam, and an accuracy to a hundred grams.
And that´s what I´ve been using ever since. No batteries to be replaced, and no weight changes between weigh-ins that were just minutes apart. Expensive, but worth every penny, if only for the stress it saved me when hopping on and off those old scales.

Today, those scales stand in my bathroom, just beside the entrance to the shower. Every time I shower, I weigh myself before getting in. As I usually shower in the morning, after going potty, that´s the most reliable way I can think of to get my daily "net" weight.

Whenever I neglected those daily weigh-ins, the pounds would start to creep back up. For a while, I had kept the scales in my bedroom, but I found myself neglecting to step on them too often, so, they´re back in the bathroom.
As I mentioned before, they have sliding weights on a balancing beam that you have to move to find your weight, with the ten-kilo-slider fitting into a notched scale so it won´t go off its place.
And right now, I´m approaching the point where I´ll be able to take it down another notch. Just one kilogram until then.

I´m looking forward to it.


Julia