Why Is It So Hard to Stop Weighing Myself? Letting Go of the Scales Isn’t Simple
Years ago, in a moment of fierce clarity, I smashed my scales. I had just listened to a podcast about liberation, and the idea of reclaiming your body by destroying the thing that measured it really landed. It felt clear, almost urgent. So, that same day, I took a hammer, went out to the garden, and brought it down again and again until there was nothing left but scattered pieces.
I stood there feeling powerful. This felt like the end of a chapter.
A couple of weeks later, I found myself clicking ‘complete order’ on a new pair. Sleeker this time. More expensive. The kind you don’t casually destroy on a Podcast-inspired whim.
I haven’t stepped on this second pair in years. But I haven’t thrown them away either. They’re still there, tucked in the bathroom cupboard behind the spare towels and the loo roll.
When the Scales Start to Mean More Than a Number
It took me a long time to realise that the scales were never just scales.
They carried something else. A promise, of sorts. Not a promise I could have named at the time, but it was there - each time I stepped on them, each time I felt the familiar pull to the bathroom to go and measure my worth in kg, in the hopes that something might resolve this time. That today might be the magical day that I might finally land in a version of myself that felt settled.
Because the act of weighing wasn’t really about information. It was about orientation. A way of locating myself in relation to a future that felt always slightly out of reach. And once that meaning takes hold, it’s not something you simply switch off.
Even when you stop using the scales, the relationship to what they represented can linger.
A Culture That Attaches Meaning to the Number
We don’t arrive here by ourselves. We’re taught in our world, over time, that weight carries significance - that it says something about discipline, health, our moral character, and how we’re measuring up as a human.
So, the number becomes loaded, something to interpret or react to. And within that, letting go of the scales can start to feel like more than just removing an object. It can feel like losing a point of reference - a way of checking our progress and knowing where we stand.
Which is part of why the question “why is it so hard to stop weighing myself?” doesn’t have a simple answer - because what’s being held onto is rarely just the object itself.
When the Body Is Holding Onto Something Else
For me, understanding this meant tracing the feeling back… and where I landed wasn’t food, or weight. It was Christmas.
Growing up, Christmas was everything to me. Not the presents, some years we barely got any - money was tight in a family of 6 kids. But that didn’t matter, not one bit. Because it wasn’t the presents that made Christmas, but the feeling. Christmas brought with it the promise of 1 day in the year where everything softened. Where tension eased. Where the house felt warm, steady, and predictable.
And I learned to organise myself around that day. I lived for it.
Counted down to it.
Prepared for it for months prior.
Tried, in small and large ways, to make sure it would stay intact once it arrived.
Looking back, it wasn’t really about Christmas at all, but about the relief it brought. It was about having something to move toward when the present felt too much for my system.
And later, the scales would fill that same role; they would become my advent calendar to a day in the future when everything would resolve. When a certain number might bring with it a different kind of day. Not because the number itself had power, but because it came to represent something else entirely.
Not a Sign You’re Failing - Just Something That Once Meant Safety
So what if the question we’re invited to ask here is not, why am I still holding onto this?
But what is this giving me?
Because even strategies that later feel painful often began as something else: a way of coping, of orienting, of holding onto the idea that things could feel different, eventually.
And when something has carried that kind of meaning, it doesn’t always disappear just because you’ve changed. Parts of you may still recognise it as something that once helped, which makes the hesitation make sense.
And what if this is not something that needs to be forced away but simply understood.
And maybe, over time, it shifts on its own, as the object no longer holds what it once did.
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