Weight in the Museum

Losing weight is usually the first thing clients talk about in their plan to get fit and healthy, followed by the number they want to reach. People can become so fixated on their weight that they deem this number as the deciding factor in whether they are healthy or not, or whether they are improving.

We live in a culture where the symbol of good health is typically attached to your weight. It’s thrown at us from multiple directions all of the time which can be discouraging. I used to let that get to me, and there were things that got sacrificed because of that weight fixation. Mainly, my overall happiness.

I know the feeling of being a slave to that number on a scale all too well. As a dancer having to always look a certain way, you can rest assured that I had disordered eating habits, and a very bad relationship with the scale. I share this because I was recently reminded of a moment I had a few years ago that opened my mind to a new way of thinking about weight and my relationship to it.

It was one of those random moments that I didn’t even realize was life changing until much later, and in typical ironic universe fashion, it happened while I was having fun.

Before my husband and I moved out of New York, we made it a point to make a list of all the things we wanted to do there one last time. One of those things was visiting the Museum of Natural History on the Upper West Side. There’s one exhibit where the solar system is outlined on the floor and each planet is represented by a scale. You then step on each scale to see what you weigh on each planet. I was having a lot of fun experimenting and seeing what I weighed on different planets when it occurred to me:

Our weight on Earth really doesn’t mean a thing.
It means something only relative to something else.

I came to realize that weight is actually quite meaningless on its own. It by itself doesn’t measure all of the other things that go into optimal health.

Other physiological changes are also happening because of the work you are putting in. I get it, you want to measure your progress and see the results of exercising more and eating better.

You want to see the evidence.

But that evidence doesn’t always appear on the scale.

Listen, of course weight is important to consider when looking at the overall picture of your health, but if you want to measure true progress and take a break from fixating on a number on scale, here are a couple of things you can do:

Use another way to measure your health progress either in conjunction with the scale or without it, and see what happens. For example:

• Use a heart rate monitor. Knowing whether you are hitting heart rate zones within any given workout will determine whether or not the scale will change faster. A heart rate monitor measures efficiency. Determining whether or not your body is working efficiently is a more important indicator of your health than the number on the scale.

• Measurements: Often times (especially for women) this is a much more accurate way to measure progress. Sometimes weight is the last thing to change, but your body has actually transformed already (Often reflected in the way clothes fit differently)

It seems a bit contradictory but letting go of watching your weight on the scale can actually help you lose weight. If you are someone who gets easily frustrated by what you see on the scale, here on Earth there are other ways to measure your progress.

And just remember,

On another planet you weigh something different, and in space, you are weightless.