episode 140: can the scale improve your body confidence?

Aug 14

Episode 140 of The Diet Diaries is all about the scale and why it plays such a massive a role in our body confidence and body image insecurities.

improve body confidence and lose weight without counting calories

We’ve learned to rely on the scale for all measures of progress around health, wellness, body confidence and even self esteem. We let the scale dictate our mood, influence what we eat and how we exercise and until it feels like a chokehold on our entire life.

Today’s episode is unpacking how and why this happened and what to do to improve your body confidence:

What does the scale actually measure?
How to use the scale in a way that’s helpful instead of harmful
What to expect when you are using the scale to measure progress
What impacts scale weight
How to assign less meaning and separate your emotions from the number you see
How to know if you need to work on your relationship with the scale

As always I share my personal experience with the scale, what finally helped me find peace with it and how I find my own body confidence.

Check out episode 139 which talks all about how to measure progress without the scale and this blog post with my top 3 tips to improve negative body image.

Welcome to the Diet Diaries, a podcast where we have candid, heartfelt conversations that will help you figure out what, why and how to eat so you can feel amazing in your body, because it's time to break the all or nothing mindset of yoyo dieting, food obsession and feeling ruled by the scale. I'm your host, body image and nutrition coach, jordana Edelstein. I'm so happy you're here. Hi friends, welcome back to the Diet Diaries. I'm hesitating there because, as I'm recording this, I'm not quite sure what episode it's going to be, and that is because I am interviewing a guest tomorrow and I haven't decided yet if that's going to be the next episode or this is going to be the next episode, so it doesn't really matter. Welcome back to today's episode, or the most recent episode of the Diet Diaries. I'm going to jump right in today. No announcements, I don't think. Maybe I'm forgetting something, who knows. And this is actually a good follow up to episode 139, which is either going to be last week or two weeks ago, where I talked about progress. If you haven't listened to that, I talk about how to measure progress without the scale, really without any kind of numbers, clothing sizes, scale, tape measures, any of that stuff. What we're looking for, like how do you know you're making progress when either the scale isn't moving or you're not using the scale, or you know that you can no longer rely on the scale. So it might surprise you that today I am talking about the scale and it's actually. They are really nice fit because I'm going to talk all about what the scale is, what it isn't, why you might want to use it, why you might not want to use it, how to decide. There's no right or wrong. This is all just contacts and information so that you can make an informed, autonomous choice about what works for you. So let's just dive in here. This scale. We think that when we get on the scale, that it's only basically showing us if we have gained or lost fat, and arguably, that is, like the least the last thing it's telling you. The scale is measuring your entire body weight, and your body weight fluctuates every day. It is completely normal and part of being a healthy human being for your body weight to fluctuate every day. Under no circumstances and for no human being alive is your body weight going to be exactly the same every single day for days, months, years on end. That would literally make you a robot. So that's kind of the first big thing to understand. We have for some reason been convinced that our body weight if it goes up, we've gained weight. If it's gone down, that we've lost, I'm going to say fat. If it's gone up, we've gained fat. If it's gone down, we've lost fat. That is not how it works, because the scale is measuring everything inside of your body and there's a lot more besides just body fat inside your body. So when the scale is fluctuating on a day to day basis and you can see fluctuations from really small, like a tenths of a pound, up to four, five, six pounds, and you might be like, holy crap, how is that even possible? There's a lot of things that contribute to that. One of the biggest things, or I should even say one of the biggest things I'm just going to share a couple of them. One is obviously water retention, and water retention can be influenced by many different factors how much salt you ate, how many carbohydrates you've eaten. Carbs hold onto water Molecularly. That's how they work. I think it's three grams of water bind onto one gram of carbohydrate at like a cellular level. So your body, if you eat more carbs, you're going to retain more water. That's why when you go on a low carb diet, you get like a sudden drop on the scale. It's not because you've lost like seven or eight pounds of body fat in five or six days. It's because your body is releasing all the water that the carbs hold onto. It doesn't make carbs bad, it's just science. This is like biochemistry. If you have had a bowel movement, obviously, if you are not pooping regularly, if you're constipated, that is going to impact your body weight. Sleep and stress can impact water retention. They can create inflammation which is going to show up on the scale. There are a lot of factors that can change day to day that are going to make the scale go up and down and that's just like scientific fact and kind of accepting. That is really helpful, because then when you get on the scale and you see that it's fluctuated, you're like, okay, this is normal. Like, let's say, the scale is 170 pounds on Monday and then you get on the next day it's 172 pounds. It is biologically, physiologically, scientifically impossible for you to gain two pounds of body fat overnight. Go ahead and get that, please. It is impossible. You have not gained two pounds of body fat overnight. Something else has fluctuated, likely your body's retaining more water. That's like the biggest thing. Why is it retaining more water? Could be one of the reasons I listed a little while a couple minutes ago. Could be another reason that I'm not even including there are our bodies are adapting and they are constantly responding to stimulus and inputs, and water retention is one of those responses. If you eat a shit ton of salty food, your body's going to retain water to balance that out. That's chemistry. That's like that science. We can't control that. Your body is doing that as like a protective measure for you. It's not a bad thing. It's a bad thing if you're constantly eating tons and tons of salty foods and your body is chronically retaining water. Yes, that's, then, something that needs to be addressed. Just accepting that fluctuations are normal is a really important part. If you are someone who wants to use the scale, you need to accept that it's going to go up and down every day. It's going to look like a jagged line. It's not. If you're working on fat loss, it is not going to be a straight, smooth, downward curving line. It is going to be a jagged line up and down, like picture, like the stock market. When you see a graph of the stock market like that. Over time, we want the trend of that line to be gently, shallowly downward, sloping that slow, sustainable weight loss over time. But as you draw that line through it to see the overall trend, within that are going to be all kinds of spikes, and that is totally normal. There's a lot of different ways to use the scale. You can obviously choose not to use it at all. If you are working on fat loss, you can choose not to use the scale. There are other ways to measure progress, arguably, that are, to be honest, may give you more helpful information, like how your clothes are fitting. How clothes fit can shift a little bit because of water retention, but over a bigger span of time, if you notice the way your clothes are fitting is either getting tighter or looser, that's going to be more of an indication of fat loss, some muscle loss and some muscle gain too. There's really the only way to tell the difference between fat loss and muscle loss and fat gain. Well, I shouldn't say that Not the only way. Tools that measure body fat, which are not all precise and not really anything I shouldn't say. There's some things now you can do at home, but if you're working on gaining muscle and you're getting stronger. Probably you're also going and you're working on, maybe, hypertrophy, which is increasing muscle size that could cause, potentially, your clothes to get tighter. You might not necessarily be gaining body fat, but maybe you're gaining muscle. I'm kind of going off on a tangent. I want to pull myself back in because that's a little bit of a separate episode but what I was starting to talk about before I went down that road is that you can Way yourself. Never. You can weigh yourself every day and you can weigh yourself any amount in between. But whatever you choose to do, the context around that matters. So if you are someone who decides I'm gonna weigh myself once a week, you need to remember that you're not seeing all those fluctuations day to day. So you could get on the scale on a Wednesday and Maybe that's a day when your body is fluctuated up and you haven't seen all those other data points between this Wednesday and last Wednesday when maybe there were a couple where it was down. So you don't have all the data. You have a very limited amount of data and therefore we can't draw as many conclusions from that. We don't get as much information. We can't interpret that data in the same way as if you weigh yourself every day. You see those fluctuations you get more data gives you more information, gives you better Insights. Now I'm not telling you that you need to weigh yourself every day. That is a very individualized decision that's gonna be based on your history with dieting, your body image, Kind of your relationship with the scale and how much you rely on it for your self-worth, for your happiness, for your mood, for Letting it set the tone for the day. I'm simply Letting you know that how often you choose to weigh yourself, you have to use sort of the context around that for how you interpret that information. You can't use the data you get for weighing yourself once a week in the same way that you get that you use the data. If you weigh yourself every day, you just you can't. It's not the same. You're not getting the same amount of information. You cannot draw the same insights. It would be like you know a pharmaceutical company doing an experiment on one person and doing it on a hundred people and Taking the data they get from one person and using it the same way as the data you get from a hundred people. You'd be like hell. No, I want the data from a hundred people. I want more information to know whether or not this is good for me. It's the same thing, right? Weighing yourself 30 times, meaning every day over the course of the month, versus weighing yourself four times, which would be once a week over the course of the month. You are not getting the same data. You cannot use it in the same way, and that's okay. One is not better than the other. This is just facts. So just think about that, because I have worked with and know a lot of people who like to weigh themselves once a week Totally fine. But then if they see that that number is up, it's like oh my god, I gained weight? Probably not. You probably haven't. The scale has just gone up as a response to Something you've eaten, or how you've exercised or not exercised, or how you have been sleeping or not sleeping, or stress, or all of these factors that impact our weight. So that's really, really important. I mentioned this before a little bit. I'm gonna go back to it. Like, the scale again cannot distinguish Between water, between muscle, between body fat, between poop. It doesn't know the difference. It's just giving you a number. Right, and remember when we want to lose. When we talk about losing weight, we're talking about losing fat we want to lose. When you want to lose fat, you will inevitably lose some muscle. That is normal and that is okay. We want to mitigate that, meaning minimize it as much as possible by eating sufficient protein, which is gonna be 0.75 times your body weight in pounds. And if that number freaks you out, there's other episodes you can listen to about how to work yourself up towards that goal. If you're eating, you're probably not eating anywhere close to that right now. That's okay. You don't start doing that tomorrow. You work up to it, and I'm gonna link the protein episode in the show notes so that if you're like, oh my god, what's you talking about? I'm freaking out now. Don't freak out, it's okay. There's a way to get there over time. But mitigating muscle loss while you want to lose weight happens from eating sufficient protein and from strength training. You don't want to lose weight, you want to lose fat. That's super important, and the scale is not really showing you the difference between those two things Again. So how do you know? Often you can tell by how your clothes fit by. You know what your body looks like, right? I know that might bring up some like well, what about body image? And why does it matter what I look like? Right, we have to look at these things more objectively. Right, if you want to lose fat, you can see some of those changes physically happening in your body Again, like that's just subjective science. Like you can see, like I know I've talked about this openly recently I've gained weight in my stomach. I can physically see it Like I don't need a scale to tell me, I don't need clothes to tell me. I can see it on my belly right, and I know that when I have less fat on my belly, I know that it looks different. That's not a judgment about what is good or what is bad, but you can visually see body fat changes, just like you can sometimes also visually see muscular changes, even if you have kind of some body fat over it. You can. If you've built like a good amount of muscle, you can often see it, feel it. Feel it like touching it, but feel it also like in your movement. So just remember that the scale is not the most accurate measure of how your body fat is changing, how your clothes fits, kind of how you feel what you see in the mirror again, without judgments. I just want to repeat that because I think that people are going to hear me say that, oh, you can see weight loss, you see it reflected back in the mirror, and they're going to think that it's like well, what about body Like? It's just about seeing it and objectively saying, yes, I see more body fat, yes, I see less body fat, without labeling it, without judging it, without assigning meaning to it. Factual more body fat, less body fat. Right, these are objective facts that we then assign meaning to. Okay, so that's the difference here, you know. So, just kind of, going back to the scale, so many of us I would say I would bet 95% of the people listening to this have, at one point or another, let the scale dictate your self-worth, your mood, how you interact with other people, how you talk to yourself, how you eat for the rest of that day, right? So that number fluctuates up for all the reasons I've talked about, and you're like, oh my god, I'm disgusting, I'm not eating carbs today, I can't wear this outfit and you're in a shitty mood all day. The next day the scale goes down. You're like, oh my god, great look, it worked. Like I'm amazing, I'm wonderful Part of the work around the scale. If you are someone who wants to weigh yourself every day to get that data, there's also a lot of mental and emotional work that needs to go along with that so that you learn how to not assign the meaning to those numbers. That you have been, and in some ways I did this. I weighed myself every day for a very long time and it was a huge factor in why I really now no longer give a shit about the scale, my scale the battery happens to be dead. I haven't weighed myself in a while because I haven't had a battery. I know for sure that that number is up. I don't know how much. I'm kind of guessing it's in like the five to six to seven pound range and I'm like you know what. Okay, I shared an email if you're not on my email list, you can always sign up for that but I shared an email kind of with an update about my functional medicine stuff and some changes like I am arguably healthier now based on how I've been eating, how I've been moving, supplements I've been taking and my body composition hasn't changed at all. The things I was worried about, specifically some of the cardiovascular risks I was worried about because of the additional belly fat and because of the PCOS, everything all the markers have improved. So all this, to say that what the scale number says is not always I mean, I might say even ever a reflection of your health. There's a lot of other markers and pieces of data and information. That being said, right, the scale is still part of our lives. It's still something we have a relationship with. And when you, if you do decide to weigh yourself every day, you start to see those fluctuations right. And when you are really focused on your effort and on your actions prioritizing protein, prioritizing fiber, using plate planning, exercising, working on body image skills, right, all the skills that we work on in coaching you know that you are showing up for yourself and you rely, not rely, on that, but you use that as kind of a measure of who you are, because those are the actions in alignment with your values. The number on the scale is going to do what it is going to do. There are a lot of things in this life that we have no control over and the number on that scale is at the very top of that list. You cannot control it, you cannot manipulate it. I shouldn't say that there are obviously athletes and wrestlers who do crazy things, and they do. It is crazy, extreme behavior that people do to manipulate the scale, which I'm not even going to get into because it's really not part of this conversation. But you can't control the rate at which your body loses fat. You can't control how much water your body holds on to if you've eaten a salty meal or if you've eaten more carbs. Your body's gonna do what it's gonna do to protect you and to keep you safe. Right, that is. Your body's job is to keep you alive, to keep you safe, to protect you. Everything it does is in service of that. That is evolution, right, survival of the fittest. And your body will do whatever it needs to do to keep you alive, even if it's not really doesn't make sense to you or is going against what you want it to be doing up in your brain. So when you weigh yourself every day, you start to see those fluctuations, and when you're taking consistent action in a line with your values, you are able to kind of separate those two things and really see okay, I'm feeling good, I'm eating protein, I'm exercising, etc. Etc. And the scale went up. It's gone up, it's gone up, it's gone up, it's gone up. And I'm gonna keep going with what I am doing and what I know works, because I know I feel good. And if you're working on fat loss and you keep going with that, the scale will go down eventually. Don't know when, don't know how long it's gonna take, it will go down and then it'll go back up and then it'll go down and you'll get your little stock market grade. But values, actions and effort aligned with your values, what's important to you, what makes you you. That is what helps you separate yourself emotionally from the scale, because you no longer have to rely on that number for your self-worth and to tell you if you're doing a quote good job or doing a bad job. You know what you're doing because you are working on those skills right, and that's where your intention and your awareness is focused is on taking action on those skills every day, not getting up and stepping on the scale and being holy shit. What's it gonna say? What's my day gonna be like? What kind of mood am I gonna be in today? You're leaving it up to the scale to decide. That for you, is such a miserable way to live, and I know that 99% of you listening know that feeling where the scale dictates your mood for better or worse. Right, it goes down, you're in a great mood. It goes up, life sucks. It does not have to be that way. And the same thing goes even if you're using the scale once a week. Same thing goes, right. You want to be able to look at that number objectively, as a piece of information, one piece of information mixed in with lots of other pieces of information, right, that give you insight into what you might want to change or what you might want to keep the same. You know we're looking to move in a direction like more neutrality, towards the scale. It's a piece of objective information. It is not a judgment on your self-worth. It is not a measure of how good of a person you are, how bad of a person you are. It is not a reflection of how hard you've tried or how hard you haven't tried. It's just a piece of data. And again, I know we can logically hear that and it makes sense. But then how do you actually internalize that? And again, I'll say it again you internalize it by identifying what your values are, what's important to you, what makes you you, and sometimes a way to do that because sometimes it's hard to do that around food is think about some of the most important things in your life that you really care about. Why do you care about them? What makes them meaningful to you? That can start to help you identify your values. Then we take that and apply it to food, to exercise, to self-care, and when you start to identify skills to help you take action and align with those values in those areas and you do that consistently that is how you separate yourself. That is how you stop applying so much meaning to that number, because now you derive your meaning and your self-worth from those actions aligned with your values, not from this random fucking number that you can't control. It's like the same thing with the clothing sizes. It's like you buy a pair of jeans from a store and you get the same jeans, the same size, different color, and they fit totally fucking different Like I did an episode on this and you're like, oh my god, what's wrong with me? These pants don't fit. Well, no, it's because they change the sizes and there's no like standard to how those sizes are done. So you're leaving your well-being and self-worth up to this totally random flawed system Right, when, if you focus on what you can control and what you do and the actions you take in alignment with your values, then you don't have to rely on that external, uncontrollable stuff anymore. I'm trying to think of what else I want to talk about. I make a list now of things and I keep looking over at it here. I think I kind of mentioned this, but really, like, a smaller number on the scale is not a measure of health. You can and again, if you're listening to this podcast, you've done it before. You can lose weight and not be a healthier person, right, if you have sacrificed your mental and emotional health with an extremely rigid, restrictive diet, if you are binging or overeating, if you are constantly emotional eating. You know that you so, my point being, I kind of just like pulled in a couple of other concepts that maybe necessarily weren't tied into this but you can be a smaller weight and not be a healthier person, right? Because you can lose weight in an unhealthy way and when I say unhealthy way, you can restrict entire food groups, so your body's lacking certain nutrients and nutrition and for that same reason, you can be really negatively impacting your mental and emotional well-being. So just keep that in mind Again. We have been so conditioned to think smaller number going down is good, bigger number going up is bad, and it is. That is an extremely reductionist view of what health is, of what the scale is useful for, of what those numbers mean. It's just really not helpful at all. There's so much more context and so much more nuance to it, so just kind of, you know, put that in the back of your mind Again. I'm gonna say it again, for maybe definitely the third, maybe from the fourth or fifth time, but that's okay, because we need to hear things way more than five times before they sink in. If you are struggling with the scale, with that number, where you know that it is dictating your mood for the day, where you have anxiety before you get on the scale, for what that number is going to say and how it's going to make you feel if you change your behaviors based on the number that you see, if you are restricting food and the scale is going down and it reinforces you to help to continue restricting the food, if the scale goes up and you're like, oh, I gotta cut something out, I gotta do extra workouts at the gym, I've gotta change something and you're doing that constantly, right, there's that. It's a constant reaction, react, react. React to those numbers on a daily or sometimes even on a weekly basis. Right? That is when you need to take a step back and say, okay, I am, I have put all of my self-worth and I am relying 100% on that number to make decisions for me and how I'm gonna feel about myself. And that is when we need to start really working on skills and again find figuring out what your values are and I know I talk about this a lot and I've done a podcast episode about it and I will try to remember to link it in the show notes again but figuring out who you are and what makes you you. Right, I talk about my values kindness and self-compassion a lot and I apply those to food and eating and exercise and self-care and managing stress. It's work, it's hard, I'm not perfect at it by any means, but I am always trying to show up for myself and think about how are the ways that I'm responding to some of my negative thoughts? Are those responses, those, those feelings, those thoughts, the behaviors that come out of those feelings and thoughts? Are they in alignment with my values or not, right? So really getting clear on that and figuring out how you take action in alignment with your values, that is how you stop relying less on the skill. Just hearing me say that, just hearing me say, oh, stop doing that, is fine, but we all know like that is not enough, right? We can hear things logically oh, I need to see more protein. Oh, that makes sense. Oh, I need to go for walks, I need to strengthen. Yeah, I totally get, it makes sense. Actually doing those things and making them happen consistently over the long term. That's the work. That's what coaching is about, right, that's behavior change. I would argue that coaching is much less about like, oh, you know, you need to more protein, more vegetables, and like, how do I actually do that? Right, that's the challenge. So anyway, like I went off on a bunch of tangents in this episode, I'm sorry. Thanks for hanging in there with me, thanks for listening, thank you for being here, thank you for sharing the podcast, and I will be back, as always, next Monday.