Scale Trauma
**TRIGGER WARNING: Weight loss talk (no numbers)
Why do we pretend stepping on a scale is harmless?
Aside from a child (who hasn’t been indoctrinated into our weight-loss obsessed culture yet), I have never met a human who could step on a scale without trepidation or explanation (“I had a big dinner last night!”) For many people, the scale directly impacts their mood, what they will allow themselves to eat that day and how hard they need to push (punish) themselves at the gym.
“I lost weight! I feel great!”
“I gained weight. I feel terrible.”
“I felt great because I thought I lost weight. But the scale said I gained weight so now I feel terrible.”
The scale has a tremendous amount of power because of the value and moral purity we attach to losing weight. For decades, courtesy of diet culture and an eating disorder, I was a true believer. I believed in the ultimate and absolute healing powers of weight loss. I thought losing weight would fix everything. Cure my anxiety and depression. Cure my eating disorder. Heal my often-debilitating self and body hatred. I thought when I finally lost the weight, I would be smarter, healthier, more beautiful, a better mother and finally feel like I belong. I believed losing weight was the key to living my best life.
And no matter how hard I tried, I couldn’t maintain a constant state of weight-loss. (Spoiler alert: No one can.) The scale served as frequent and potent confirmation that my body wasn’t worthy of love, connection or belonging and neither was I.
When stepping on a scale is the ultimate arbiter of your value and self-worth it is not just harmful, it is trauma. I call it Scale Trauma. And we need to start talking about it. Especially within the context of eating disorder recovery, where patients are experiencing treatment sanctioned scale trauma on a regular basis.
Scale trauma is the eruption of stress and anxiety that occurs before, during and/or after stepping on a scale. The stress and anxiety can be so consuming it overwhelms one’s ability to cope.
For the almost thirty million individuals in America battling eating disorder thoughts and/or behaviors, stepping on a scale can cause overwhelming physical and mental stress, anxiety and depression. The ACT of stepping on the scale is the trauma. Knowing the number (number trauma) is a separate trauma akin to pouring kerosene onto an already raging fire of eating disorder thoughts. I distinguish between the two because there seems to be an unspoken fallacy amongst the eating disorder recovery community that “blind weigh-ins,” where the person on the scale doesn’t see the number, are benign.
In eating disorder recovery, stepping on a scale is never benign.
During the many years I suffered with an eating disorder and struggled with recovery, knowing I had to step on the scale when I went to the doctor was intolerably stressful. For days and/or weeks leading up to the appointment, my anxiety would turn into a hurricane of eating disorder thoughts and behaviors as I stressed about what the scale might reveal. To be clear, I almost never knew the actual number because my weigh-ins were “blind.”
But “blind weigh-ins” were rarely blind. Either the number slipped out or the doctor’s mood and behavior indicated what the scale said about me. Most of my primary care physicians let the number slip out in one way or another. The only thing I thought about during and after the visit was my weight gain or weight loss.
The number didn’t usually slip out with my recovery providers, but I always knew if my weight was up (my doc was so proud of me and super positive) or down (my doc seemed distant and didn’t trust me). Whatever the number, I knew that number defined me in that moment. Whether it was a therapist or nutritionist, he or she used that number to determine if I was complying or not complying with treatment. The underlying distrust between us was palpable and completely antithetical to recovery. Rather than focus on the feelings and emotions triggering my eating disorder thoughts and behaviors, we were both distracted by my weight.
Scale trauma is real and we cannot afford to ignore its negative impact on eating disorder recovery.
There isn’t a doubt in my mind that one of the reasons I am Recovered today is because I wasn’t exposed to scale trauma during my recent recovery. I haven’t stepped on a scale in two and a half years. In fact, my therapist and I never used my physical appearance as a metric to track my progress (this was hard for me but important). The focus was on my thoughts and behaviors. I didn’t feel shame for having eating disorder thoughts and/or behaviors during recovery because I knew having them, confronting them, challenging them and diffusing them was part of recovery. She and I tracked my progress by how my thoughts, language and behavior evolved. Removing scale trauma had a positive impact on my recovery because it opened up space to heal.
This isn’t a call to action to remove all scales from eating disorder recovery (although wouldn’t that be awesome!) I recognize the use of scales in eating disorder recovery is deeply ingrained and even well-intentioned. This is a call to action to start talking about scale trauma. To acknowledge and address the negative impact of scale trauma in eating disorder recovery and start talking about other, less traumatic, metrics.
6 Comments
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jacostello
I finally found someone whose situation is much like mine. Thank you for being brave enough to write about such a difficult topic. You are truly an 😇 on 🌎. Hugs 🙏💕
roadtorecovered2015
Thank you so much! It means so much that you took the time to read and comment. You are not alone. The pain and impact of scale trauma is very real. It is important that we start talking about it.
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thejourneybacktocom
This is so interesting. (Possible trigger warning, mentions weight ranges) I can totally see both sides of it. I am still in outpatient therapy and see a dietitian and HATE weigh ins. Exactly like you mentioned, it gives me so much anxiety, even thought they don’t tell me the number. I can normally tell what happened based on their reactions, anyways. However, I can see the reasoning why they do it. When I first started working with them I truly believed I was “fine”, despite being underweight. I think weigh ins were probably necessary because I would have told my providers until I was blue in the face that I WAS doing well, I was eating well- the anorexia had totally convinced me that I was “just being healthy”. Since it took me quite a while to even acknowledge that I had a problem, the scale was really my providers only way of telling how I was actually doing since I wasn’t verbally telling them. Even now that I’m in a much healthier place, I feel torn. I hate being weighed. I’m an adult, it feels very punitive. But at the same time, if I go several weeks without appts, I have the tendency to just not eat as much without even really meaning to, and then can fall out of my weight range again. My therapist claims that when that happens, my ability to think clearly about recovery is automatically impacted due to just being underweight, and I always think that I’m “fine”, so the scale helps give them (and in turn, me), a reality check. I think the research that shows proper re nourishment (and potential weight gain as a result of that) IS so vital to recovery that I can see why we look to the scale…but it also feels horrible.
roadtorecovered2015
Thank you so much for sharing your perspective and experience. I am so grateful for your voice. Your opinion and experience matter. I totally agree that sustained nourishment is vitally important to recovery and there are non-scale related ways to track the process of body re-nourishment. Maybe you could talk to your therapist about using other metrics or maybe talk about how stepping on a scale makes you feel? There are no easy answers but I’ve learned that talking about the impact of scale trauma is more helpful to recovery than not talking about it. I use to feel so much shame because I couldn’t “just step on a scale.” I thought there was something wrong with me because the scale felt like a bully. When I started sharing my story and experience, I began to see that I wasn’t alone. My therapist and I also looked at other metrics to monitor my recovery. Journaling was a powerful tool because I could go back and read different parts of my journal and see how far I’d come. Like total and complete mind-shifts that I couldn’t see in the moment but were so clear in retrospect.