Some More Thoughts About Weight Loss

I’m not happy with my body. I view so much of that dissatisfaction through the lens of my numerical weight - if I weigh myself, I have some kind of emotional response one way or the other, even that doesn’t have any bearing on how my body looks or works at all. I tell myself that, much like Regina George, I really wanna lose 3 pounds (who am I kidding, the number is never as low as three, and I could never even hope to be Regina George), or that I would be so much happier if I weighed so-and-so amount, like once the scale magically hits that number, all my issues will be sorted.

I am doing my best to poke fun at myself and acknowledge that this way or thinking isn’t especially rational or helpful, but I am far from alone in it. Like everything else wrong with our lives today, there is a massive industry that profits off keeping us fixated on our weight, and they’re devoting more resources to maintaining the status quo than I can wrap my head around. I (and I suspect others) very quickly lose sight of my number one goal - to be happier with my body - and focus entirely on my secondary goal, to lose weight. And I don’t even know if losing weight will actually make me happier with my body even if I do it.

Even aside from the influences of Big Diet, I do think the obvious appeal of placing so much attention on my weight is that it’s quantifiable. A lot of people use its easily-measurable nature to track their progress, to set goals and to hold themselves accountable, they make bets about how much weight they can lose in a certain time, they post on weight loss subreddits their starting weight, current weight and goal weight, they track their weight daily in an app. I’m just the same, I have in fact done options 1 & 3, and I’ve spent a lot of time reading about other people’s reddit posts on the topic.

But I think, for me at least, it fundamentally measures the wrong thing (some people also do need to lose weight for medical reasons, I am talking about people like myself, who are relatively physically healthy). Why don’t I log what I thought when I looked at myself in the mirror in an app every day? Why don’t I write reddit posts about the process of learning to love the incredible things my body lets me do every single day? Why don’t I ever book a prop bet on whether or not I can actually comprehend how a person of sound mind could be physically attracted to me?

I’m not sure if any of those things are actually the answer, but I know that I really want to shift my focus away from what the scales say, and back to what really matters.