Episode Transcript
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Welcome to Nutrition For Mortals, the podcast that says life is too damn short to spend your time and attention worrying about your food choices.
So let's take a deep breath and then join us, two registered dietitians and friends, as we explore the world of nutrition with a special focus on cultivating a healthy and peaceful relationship with food.
My name is Matt Priven, and I am joined as always by my co-host and the best dietitian on planet Earth, Jen Baum.
Hey, Jen.
Hey, Matt.
So today we're talking about bathroom scales and more specifically, when is a bathroom scale necessary?
And I think we're going to talk all about the history of bathroom scales.
I even think we are going to have a little bit of a tangent to talk about a time in recent history where bathroom scales were really front and center in our consciousness.
And I'll give you a little teaser about who we may be talking about.
Hi, Taylor.
So we're going to talk about that later on.
Let's get into it.
So Jen, tell me the history of the bathroom scale.
How do these things get into our homes?
So I'm really excited about our topic today because I think that many people have a kind of love-hate relationship with the bathroom scale.
And like most things in nutrition and wellness and health, bathroom scales have a pretty interesting history.
I guess we'll call this section the rise of the bathroom scale.
Okay, love it.
Yeah.
And so what's really interesting is that the general public really didn't have access to any type of scale until really like the late 1800s.
So we're talking about like 1885-ish before the average person had access to any type of scale.
Any type of scale, like to measure a goose.
Yeah, exactly.
They could not even measure a goose before 1885.
Okay, I imagine that's what everyone was measuring in 1885.
Oh, 100%.
Yeah, a grain, like sacks of grain, I imagine.
Yeah, right.
And so scales themselves, weighing something against something else has been around for a really long time, but knowing the actual weight of an object and your daily goings on is pretty new.
Exactly.
Right around 1885, penny scales began being imported from Germany.
And these were really very novel for people.
So these were the type of scales where you could go put a penny into the scale, step on the scale, and it would kind of shoot out like a little piece of paper and would give you your weight.
And people really loved them and found them incredibly fascinating.
So much so that they were actually like lines up to these penny scales where people would wait for like a significant amount of time to like find out their weight.
They were curious.
It's like really novel information.
They like didn't imagine before this, they didn't even like really think about it that much.
And then suddenly there was this idea like, oh, you have a weight to you and you could figure it out.
Yeah, exactly.
And so again, super novel.
And of course, when the kind of like American industry saw how intrigued people were with these penny scales, our country began producing them as well.
And then penny scales were really kind of popping up everywhere.
Like they'd be in movie theaters or train stations or general stores.
And so really, they became really prominent very quickly because people were really interested in them.
And from there, the first home scales went on sale right around 1913.
Again, these were imported from Germany because the idea was, oh, well, people want to know their weight.
So let's sell them something else where they can check their weight themselves in their home.
So they were kind of public utilities, so to speak.
I mean, I guess people paid for them, but they were in public spaces.
And then this is the transition where it kind of goes private.
You kind of get into people's homes.
Yeah, exactly.
And so people began buying their own scale right around early 1900s.
And what I found was amazing is that bathroom scales in the early 1900s managed to sell despite the fact that the vast majority of Americans didn't even have flush toilets.
Whoa.
Gotcha.
So this technology is now in your bathroom, but you cannot flush your toilet.
Yes, exactly.
So people were so into them that they'd spend money on them.
And again, it caught on really quickly.
And from there, the bathroom scale industry really took off.
And I'm going to actually send you a quote.
This is from Peter Sterns, who authored Fat History.
And it's a great quote that I think speaks to kind of what was happening around the early part of the 20th century that led to the interest and the intrigue around the bathroom scale.
So it says, It wasn't until this curious turning point in the early 20th century that the general public and the medical community in that order began to treat weight as a health factor and eventually a health panic.
Unlike other paradigm shifts in public health, the campaign against cigarette smoking, the use of seat belts, this one did not originate with any major scientific research.
There was no medical conversion preceding the shift in public perception, says Sterns.
People were watching and worrying about weight before their doctors were.
So what I find to be so interesting about this is that really it was the public, the general public, that started essentially being focused on and obsessing about their weight, even before doctors and health care professionals in this country.
And I find that to be fascinating because you'd think it would be the opposite.
You'd think it would be health care first leading this charge or encouraging people to check this number or weigh themselves.
But the truth is that's really not how it happened.
It was really people began being interested in this number before doctors.
Yeah, that's so interesting.
It just like was an option suddenly to weigh yourself.
And people wanted to do it so badly that maybe there were sort of like health implications associated with it, but it wasn't born out of scientific research or sort of being pushed from the medical community that it's important to weigh yourself.
This is something that was really a grassroots effort to get into people's homes.
But I guess there was probably a huge marketing effort behind it.
Yeah, well, I think you and I have talked in past episodes about the very kind of clear link between weight and morality.
And I think at the beginning of the 19th century, there were some pretty old biases about weight and morality.
And the scale was somehow able to kind of like capture all of these things, right?
So the scale became this way to measure not just body weight, but also morality.
And stepping on the scale became a way of checking like, am I good enough or not?
Do I align or look like other people?
So it became this tool that was much more than just a measuring device.
Okay, so we're talking about the early 1900s.
So I mean, there are a million different types of scales that you can purchase now.
And so how has this market changed over the years?
Yeah, I think it's really interesting to note that the global market for bathroom scales was estimated to be right around $2.4 billion in 2020, and is projected to reach up to around $3 billion in 2027.
And I think it's amazing all the different evolutions of the bathroom scale that we have now.
So now scales connect to people's smartphones.
They give like an insane amount of data, body composition, water percentage, basal metabolic rate, kind of goes on and on, and links to apps where people can be like tracking this stuff, looking at these numbers constantly.
Yeah, that sounds about right from what we kind of see.
When we talk to people about how they interact with the scale, you know, they're looking at all these different metrics.
And, you know, there has been this tie into the world of health and what those metrics mean.
And so tell me a little bit about how scales integrated into health care over the years.
Yeah.
Well, like we just touched on, people became very fascinated and interested in the scale first, and then it really became integrated into the American health care system.
And I don't really think it's possible to talk about how the scale became so much a part of everyone's medical visits, right?
Anytime someone goes to any type of medical appointment, now they're weighed.
And we can't talk about how that came to be unless we talk first about the weight tables.
Weight tables, I'm sure many of us have seen these before.
I'm sure that almost everyone has come across these before.
These are kind of standardized tables that show heights and weights.
Some of them have things like frame size, and they give these weight ranges for someone's sex typically and their height as well.
And again, these are a pretty integral part of our culture as well.
But these tables actually first became standardized.
Again, we're talking late 1800s.
And they were actually standardized by one single man.
So again, this is something in nutrition where you would think that these weight tables have a ton of scientific evidence behind them.
Turns out that just one man actually created the first weight tables.
His name was George Shepherd.
And he was at the time the medical director of the Connecticut Mutual Life Insurance Company.
And he was essentially asked by the Association of Life Insurance, medical directors of America, to create a standard industry-wide height and weight table.
And so that's just what he did.
He essentially used data from around 700,000 policy holders.
Important to note, they were all men, they were all white.
And the numbers he developed became the weight standards.
Shepard decided that anything 20% above or below these average weights were risky.
And so probably really important to note that the insurance companies wanted these tables.
They wanted this data because they wanted to be able to charge policy holders more or less depending on whether or not they fell into a risky category.
So, Shepard decided that anything 20% or below above or below an average was risky, and therefore insurance companies could then charge more for those quote unquote risky individuals.
Truly insane.
So this eventually leaves the world of life insurance and kind of sneaks in through the back door of the healthcare establishment, am I right?
Exactly.
So, they really evolved from what should be not a particularly great insurance tool.
That was all it was supposed to be.
These first weight tables were averages, right?
And averages based on a very kind of small subset of the population.
And then from there, what is really interesting as well is that during the Second World War, the Metropolitan Life Insurance Company did something unique and very novel.
They made a decision to publicly publish one of their weight tables.
But rather than it being the average, they called it ideal weights.
So this is where we get this idea of ideal body weight is right around the 40s or 50s when Metropolitan Life came out and decided that these are not just averages, these are ideals that people should be falling into, weight ranges that people should be falling into, in order to be considered healthy.
Yeah.
So ideal body weight is a term that gets used in healthcare all the time.
It's kind of standard in a lot of templates for doctor's visits or dietitian visits even for that matter.
And you're saying that one dude a long time ago, working for an insurance company, came up with the template for what this ideal body weight metric is going to mean.
And it extended so far outside, even though it was a total random selection of percentages, not based on any scientific literature, it extended deep into the healthcare system and persists today.
Exactly.
Because once these weight tables were established, there became this increasing emphasis on the importance of maintaining a healthy weight, right?
When the word ideal is used, it implies that that's healthiest, that that's the goal, that that's what you should be aiming for, right?
I mean, that word ideal is very, very different than the word average.
Okay, Jen.
So we've been talking about how scales have been integrated into healthcare offices and are part of the normal routine for going to a doctor's visit.
So should they be?
I mean, a lot of people would probably say, oh yeah, well, it's helpful information to have.
It's just another piece of information about my body that might help a doctor.
So tell me a little bit about, you know, is a scale an important part of the healthcare visit and presenting to a doctor for support?
Yeah, well, I think there are definitely times where getting weighed is necessary or provides useful information.
I mean, one of the first to come to mind is if someone has congestive heart failure.
So that's a condition where as the heart starts to fail, there's less blood flow to the kidneys and that can cause fluid and water retention resulting in edema, which is like swelling around typically like the legs or the ankles or the abdomen.
And it becomes really important for individuals with congestive heart failure to track their weight pretty closely since a significant shift in weight or increase in weight might indicate that they need more medication or need to go to the hospital.
In eating disorder recovery, absolutely.
Weight should be done and weight should be tracked as someone's trying to weight restore pregnancy.
That's another one.
So particularly if a woman has had previous pregnancies where she struggled to gain weight or she may have struggled with an eating disorder, tracking weight during pregnancy is important.
And then for drug dosing or anesthesia dosing, an accurate weight is important because those dosages are weight dependent.
Yeah.
So you're giving these really specific examples of when weight information is important.
But I think, interestingly, what you're doing is you're saying it's not a universal truth that we always need to have this information in order to care for somebody's health.
And so what does a scale not tell you about your health?
Or are there ways in which the scale information is obscuring the truth about your health?
So tell me, maybe you can answer that question.
What does a scale not tell you about your health?
Well, I'd say it doesn't tell you quite a bit.
It's not going to tell you about the state of your cardiovascular system, so it's not going to give you information about your blood pressure or your cholesterol.
It's not going to give any information around your musculoskeletal health or the health of your bones, for example.
It's not going to tell you anything about your genetic history or genetic risk factors.
Definitely not going to give you any information around body composition.
Not going to tell you about mental health or mental health struggles or challenges.
So I mean, quite honestly, there's really a lot that the scale can't or doesn't tell you about your health.
Yeah.
And that's a really important point.
And I think that there's this idea in the health care system, but also in individuals that, if my weight increased, for example, since the last time I went to the doctor, then I am obviously at a higher risk of certain health outcomes or chronic diseases.
And we put all this power into that number or trends and changes in that number that really shouldn't be taken out of that information.
And I think that's one of the points we're trying to make here is the scale can provide some helpful information, but we have put so much extra power into what that number means.
And I think people might think, but isn't there an optimal weight that I should be trying to achieve or maintain?
Doesn't Shepherd up to something with these MetLife tables?
Isn't there a goal I should be shooting for?
And wouldn't it be helpful for me to step on a scale either in a doctor's office or at home to try to achieve that quote unquote optimal weight or weight range?
So what do you have to say about that?
Well, I think this idea of isn't there an optimal weight I should be trying to achieve or maintain is great and it's a really important question.
And I think in this episode, we're not going to do a deep dive into the fact that this idea of weight equals health is ultra oversimplified and problematic for many reasons.
However, I do believe there's significant evidence to show that people can be at a variety of different body weights and still be, you know, quote unquote healthy.
And the other thing is that if we loop back to where this idea of ideal weight originated, i.e.
these weight tables that were developed in the late 1800s or early 1900s by insurance companies, these tables weren't exactly developed using a ton of scientific rigor.
I mean, we've kind of highlighted that it was really one man essentially calculating averages in the population, and average does not automatically equal ideal for every single individual person.
And I think that's a point that we can't and shouldn't overlook.
You know, when I hear the question of isn't there an optimal weight I should try to maintain, I kind of hear how close am I to ideal.
And as we've already talked about this notion of ideal, it was really not grounded in science.
Yeah, we're kind of just saying like, well, prove it, you know, you may have made up this number or this percentage above and below, prove it.
And a lot of people might say, well, we've had, you know, 100 plus years of science that proves it now.
And I think you and I are saying, well, we'll get into this in a separate episode.
But we don't we don't read the research and see that we see a lot of questions still and a lot more research that needs to be done.
But ultimately, people have a big diversity in genetic predisposition to be in different body shape and sizes.
And so if we say there's an optimal weight just based on your height, we're going to be encouraging people to try to change something that's genetically predetermined.
And there are risks that come from that.
And so a lot of the times, what I see is people go to the doctor's office, they step on a scale.
Their doctor says, Oh, well, your weight went up, or it's higher than I'd like it to be.
So go fix it.
And this starts this complicated cascade of behaviors and challenges that does not lead to success in any way.
Not only success with weight loss, which was the intended goal that the doctor was encouraging, but also leads to a whole bunch of negative outcomes when people engage with dieting or restriction or deprivation in the name of health.
And so I think this is a good pivot to what happens when somebody's standing in their bathroom with the scale, trying to manage something, right?
Their health, their just their weight, how they feel about themselves.
So I guess the question is, what happens when we weigh ourselves?
Can you give me a little insight on that?
Yeah, I think that, you know, obviously everyone's relationship with the scale is going to be unique.
But I think for a large percentage of people, what often happens is that they will step on the scale, usually in the morning, and they will feel some level of dissatisfaction or failure because they don't think they weigh what they should, or they feel like they should weigh less.
And as a consequence of those feelings, they end up restricting or somehow modifying their intake, right?
So, they may say, okay, well, today I'm not going to eat carbohydrates, or today I'm going to only eat 1,500 calories, or whatever it might be.
There's some level of, okay, now I need to change my food intake in response to this number.
And there's some real kind of physiological consequences of this type of behavior.
So I'd say the first one is people will then ignore their hunger, right?
They're maybe trying to eat less or only eat certain things.
And that's going to cause an increase in the production of ghrelin.
So ghrelin is a hormone in our bodies that signals hunger.
And as ghrelin levels increase, this can result in people eating faster later in the day, they may feel compulsive around food because they've essentially been deprived right throughout the course of the day.
The other big thing that can happen is that when someone steps on the scale, they feel stressed, they feel anxiety, because they feel like they are not doing something right or their weight is not where they want it to be.
And we know very well that when people are in states of stress, there is some corresponding hormone release.
So cortisol and insulin levels are going to increase if someone's stressed, and these increased levels of stress hormones can increase the risk of high blood pressure, can cause sleep problems, can cause digestive issues, can increase the risk of feeling depressed or having chronic headaches.
So I think stress can't be overlooked in the relationship that many people have with the scale.
And this stress can be really detrimental to their health.
I think the last thing that often tends to happen is that people, once they step on the scale, they tend to think about food more generally.
They might hyper-focus or obsess around food.
And then there are some corresponding behaviors like overeating.
Once they finally stop denying themselves, or binge eating once they finally stop denying themselves.
And so I think it's really important to recognize and highlight the fact that there can be some pretty negative consequences of self-weighing with frequency.
Yeah, it's kind of one of those behaviors where there's no good outcome a lot of the time.
People step on the scale and they're hoping they see a number that they like.
And if they do, they go, all right, I have to maintain this at all costs.
But something I'm doing is encouraging this number to go the way I want it to, or stay where I want it to.
So I have to figure out what that is, and I got to double down on that.
Or they see a number that didn't move or moved in a direction that they don't want it to move.
And it triggers this whole psychological impact that you're talking about that can really be stressful and quite destructive.
And there's a whole spectrum here.
Some people are able to hold this information pretty lightly and kind of go on with their day and they might feel like, oh, yeah, I step on the scale in the morning and maybe it sends that information to a little app on my phone and it's kind of background data.
I don't really think too much about it.
But the other side of the spectrum is really disordered relationships with eating or exercise where the scale is kind of this lever that is determining how these actions are going to go.
And, you know, there's all these points along the spectrum that can really interrupt and interfere with one's sort of like having a healthy and peaceful day where they're caring for themselves in truly meaningful ways.
They're instead really just responding to the number that they saw on the scale.
And it just seems to me to be a very stressful way to go about one's life.
Yeah, and I think the other thing that's really interesting about the literature around self-weighing and how it impacts people psychologically, the studies are really kind of all over the place, meaning that there's kind of a mix of results.
Some studies that have people weigh themselves with frequency find that it doesn't actually really affect people that negatively, like in terms of self-esteem or how they're evaluating their body or eating related behaviors.
And then there's like a whole group of studies that find it definitely has some level of negative impact or it appears to have some level of negative impact, meaning that when people are self-weighing with more frequency, they may feel worse about their bodies, they may feel worse about themselves.
But what I think is really important to keep in mind with this research is that lots of these studies are actually weight loss interventions as well.
And so that the people who are self-weighing, if they are losing weight, they tend to feel more positively towards themselves and towards their bodies.
So weight loss really kind of becomes this kind of confounding variable in this equation, meaning that it'd be really interesting to talk to these people who reported feeling pretty positive after weighing themselves and see if that positive association was simply because they were losing weight.
And if their weight started to trend up, would they still feel positively about weighing themselves with frequency?
Or would they maybe feel worse about their bodies?
Would they feel worse towards themselves or towards their eating related behaviors?
Totally.
And a study is not going to be for the length of their entire life.
It's going to have a finite starting and stopping point.
And so these people might say, oh yeah, okay, it's a two month study.
I'm going to do this behavior where I step on the scale and I follow whatever plan I was given for weight loss for this period of time.
It's very different to think about just every day of your life walking into your bathroom and stepping on a scale.
You're going to have fluctuations in your weight on a daily basis, a weekly basis, monthly, yearly.
You know, people tend to gain weight as they get older, which is a protective mechanism for our body.
But most people don't understand that fully.
They think that I should weigh what I weighed when I was 23 years old or something like that.
And they're kind of constantly aspiring for weight loss.
And it's going to look very different and play out very different psychologically than somebody who's like, oh, I'm in a two-month study to see what I feel like when I step on a scale.
Absolutely.
Absolutely.
And again, really important reminder that all of these outcomes are measured by self-reported data.
So these are people like filling out a questionnaire.
And so we always have to take that kind of information with a grain of salt.
Yeah, absolutely.
Okay, gents, so I teased this earlier.
There was an event in pop culture not too long ago, just a couple months ago, where bathroom scales really entered the public consciousness.
For the first time in recent history, I can't think of a situation where the news was talking about something involving a bathroom scale in a while.
So you know, this was the music video for Taylor Swift's song, Antihero, off her album released October 2022, called Midnights.
And in the music video, Taylor steps on a bathroom scale.
She looks down, and instead of seeing a number, it just says fat in capital letters.
Then another version of Taylor standing next to her meant to represent, I think, the side of her that leads to self-destruction and bad behavior, shakes her head in disappointment.
And I will say that when I saw this video for the first time, I had some complicated feelings about this scene and the use of the word fat.
I know a lot of people did, especially people who identify as fat and want to feel proud in that identity, and they felt hurt by this usage in the video.
And so, Jen, I don't think it's super important for us in this context of this podcast to weigh in on, no pun intended, whether or not Taylor should or shouldn't have included this scene in the video.
At the end of the day, I kind of feel like she's an artist.
This is her art.
I do know there was a big media frenzy that kind of centered around the question, is Taylor Swift fatphobic?
A few days later, after releasing this music video, it was edited to remove the shot of the scale.
So now if you watch the video, you just see her step on the scale.
You don't see any reading at all.
She just steps on the scale, and then you see her doppelganger standing next to her, shaking her head in disapproval.
So why I think this is worth mentioning in our discussion is because the video centered bathroom scales in our consciousness for the first time in recent history, like I said.
Unfortunately, we weren't really talking about why Taylor chose to include this scene in the video.
I mean, there isn't a lyric in the song about stepping on a scale.
So let's talk for a minute about the meaning of Anti-Hero of Weekend.
Yeah, yeah, absolutely.
Actually, can we listen to a clip of the song?
Oh, yeah, let's do it.
All right, I love the last chorus of the song.
So I'm going to play that.
Can I just...
Music nerd out for a sec.
Yeah, we're just going to rock out now.
Yeah, yeah.
So listen to the synthesizer, like stabs that come in with this last chorus.
It's kind of like a royal trumpet, like introducing the queen, but it's just Taylor saying, hi, it's me.
I'm the problem.
All right, ready?
Yeah, I'm ready.
Ready?
Well, it's so good.
So good.
So this song, Anti-Hero, I feel is about ways we get in our own way.
Sure.
How we can be an antihero in our own lives.
There's been a lot of discussion about sort of that meaning.
I think it's a song about feeling left out.
It's about self-destructive behavior and feeling incapable of doing anything about it.
I actually have a clip of Taylor discussing the meaning of the song.
Let's take a quick listen to that.
Yeah, let's listen to it.
I really don't think I've delved this far into my insecurities in this detail before.
This song really is a real guided tour throughout all the things I tend to hate about myself.
We all hate things about ourselves.
And it's all of those aspects of the things we dislike and like about ourselves that we have to come to terms with if we're going to be this person.
So yeah, I like Anti-Hero a lot because I think it's really honest.
I think it's pretty honest too.
What do you think?
Yeah, no, I think the fact that she's highlighting and kind of delving into and admitting some of her kind of deepest, darkest insecurities is there's power in that.
Yeah, definitely, you know, the music video has different examples sort of depicting how insecurities play out in her life.
So with the scale scene, I think she's portraying the reality of how typically scales get used, which is you step on the scale, and a part of you feels like something's wrong or something needs to be done to either change it or in some cases like not lose control over what you're seeing.
And I think it's interesting because someone like Taylor Swift, she has a choice.
She knows her influence on culture more broadly on women and young women, and sharing this scene that's so vulnerable where she's telling the world that she is hyperfixated on what the scale represents, that gaining weight is a fear that has so much power over her.
I think it was making a choice to not just signal her highest virtues or make it sound like she's doing a great job of accepting herself all the time.
She seems to struggle with self-acceptance, like many people do, and she just wanted to share that in the video.
Yeah, you know, one of the things when I, because, you know, of course, I saw this part of her music video, and then I heard and then read a lot of different responses.
And, you know, to me, what really stood out is that, for me at least, is that, you know, here is this wildly successful, creative, you know, wealthy, you know, one of the, you know, arguably one of the best or biggest pop stars in the world right now, right?
And the bathroom scale still gets her, right?
I mean, like, it's still this like metal box on the ground, man, it can still derail her and trigger some pretty deep insecurities.
And that, to me, says so much about why we're talking about the bathroom scale today, because I think most people can very much identify with that feeling of stepping on the scale and then having a cascade of negative thoughts, feelings, emotions.
And I often, you know, I talk to people a lot about if there was a different behavior that you were engaging in that made you feel bad constantly, what would you do?
And most people say, well, I wouldn't, I'd stop, I wouldn't do that anymore.
And I think it becomes really important to think about that in relationship to the scale as well, how it's making you feel and whether or not it's adding any value to your daily life.
Yeah, I think it's totally right.
I think a lot of people feel like I recognize that it's not adding a lot of value to my life or that it's harming me in some way.
But the idea of giving it up feels like such an immense loss of control or awareness over, you know, something that's really been a determinant of whether I feel good or bad in a given day.
Like, what do I do?
I'm just out to sea without the scale.
Like, this is supposed to be the guiding principle of how I live for some people, right?
And so, you know, when somebody says, like, okay, I recognize that this isn't super helpful for me.
It's maybe harmful for me.
I recognize that there's not really a whole lot of data showing it's important from a health perspective to step on the scale.
What do I do?
Do I just throw this thing out the window?
You know, how do I navigate the world?
Or how do I transition away from stepping on the scale?
Do you have any thoughts on that?
Yeah, I mean, I think, of course, every person is going to be different.
And I have found that for some individuals, going completely cold turkey and stopping the scale immediately can actually be more anxiety provoking than not.
And so sometimes I encourage people to start to slowly move away from the scale, right?
If you're weighing yourself every day or a couple times a day, see if you can just decrease that frequency over time.
And in that way, kind of build trust between you and your body, right?
I mean, again, I think this number for many people is providing some level of like reassurance.
And so if you can kind of slowly transition and see that, well, you know, like your body is still going to be your body and nothing catastrophic is going to happen, then that can often help people feel more confident in this transition away from the scale.
Yeah, well said.
I think the word catastrophic is key here.
People do often have this catastrophic anxiety over what is going to happen if I'm not checking.
Is there going to be some sort of uncontrolled weight gain that happens just simply because I don't have this information?
And I think transitioning in a sort of slow and peaceful way can be helpful, where people really recognize, like you said, that nothing terrible is going to happen.
It wasn't really providing you helpful information.
If anything, it was like standing in the way of you kind of connecting with your internal cues for what you want to eat, what you want to eat, how much you want to eat, all these ways that the scale tends to interrupt our connection to our body.
And if you're going to take a break from stepping on the scale, you're going to go from daily to weekly or every other week, really try to think about what those breaks felt like.
How did your day change?
What is different?
Kind of do a little comparison of what a day looks like when you're using the scale in the morning and adjusting your behaviors accordingly versus a day where you don't have that information, especially over time as the anxiety kind of comes down a little bit.
It kind of reminds me of like exposure therapy in a way.
It's like if you're terrified of an elevator or getting on an elevator, you're not going to day one just be like, all right, well, this wasn't helping me, this fear, so I'm going to go jump into an elevator in the Empire State Building.
You're going to, like, I don't know, look at a picture of an elevator first, and then like look at a real one.
You know, you got to do this in a stepwise process where you're slowly decreasing your anxiety and your fear to the point where it doesn't feel as relevant to hold this fear anymore.
So that would be my thoughts on it.
Yeah, yeah, definitely.
Well said.
So I wonder, in the health care setting, when somebody is engaging with a doctor's office and they're being asked to step on the scale, how do we think about that?
Oh, this is one of my favorite things to talk about, because here comes my PSA, right?
Which, yeah, I'm gearing up, man.
So I love reminding people that you absolutely do not have to step on the scale at the doctor's office.
I'll let that sink in for a minute, because I think this information can be really surprising.
You do not have to step on the scale when you go to a medical appointment.
And getting weighed at medical appointments has become so automatic that I think most people don't realize or have forgotten that every single part of a medical visit, you have to give consent to.
So whether that's getting your labs drawn, whether that is getting your height measured, whether that's stepping on a scale, it's all up to you.
And so if you are somebody that struggles stepping on a scale, when you go into your next medical appointment, just say no, which I think can feel scary because there's this feeling of, but it's the doctor and they need this information or I'm doing something wrong if I'm not complying with what they want.
But the truth is that most doctors now particularly have no issue whatsoever when someone says, no, I don't really particularly want to get weighed today.
The other option is that if your doctor for some reason feels it's very necessary for you to step on a scale, that weight can always be done blind.
And what that means is that you just step on the scale backwards or the medical assistant might cover up the digital reading so you don't see the number.
And that's always an option as well.
And you might also want to tell them, don't just print this on the piece of paper you're going to hand to me as I walk out of the office, please.
Don't put it in my portal or the health portal.
Don't put it in the visit summary or anything like that because I don't want to see it.
And they can very much do that as well.
And so is the goal here to shield ourselves from this information forever?
Or what is the ultimate goal here?
Scales exist.
They're in many homes.
Even if you get them out of your home and light your scale on fire and throw it off a bridge, you're going to go...
Like I've done.
Yeah, I'm just picturing you.
I feel so seen.
I feel so seen.
Do you remember that scene in Office Space where they beat the crap out of the fax machine?
Yes, that's me with the scale.
Exactly.
Oh man, cue that song here.
Yes, yes.
And we're back.
So if people go to a family member's house for a holiday and they go in the bathroom and there's a scale there, they're going to encounter scales at other times.
So they're going to say, maybe their doctor says, you know, it's really important 10 years from now, you go to the doctor and they say, it's important to get a weight data at this point because we need it for some relevant medical issue.
Is the goal here to eventually be able to see this number?
How do we think about that?
Well, I think, well, okay, if I was in charge of the universe, if I could just wave a magic wand.
You are.
I am?
Excellent.
I'm so glad.
You know, I think ideally what I would want for everyone is for them to be able to see their weight and for it not to have power or influence over them.
For it not to make them feel like they're a bad person if they don't weigh what they think they should.
For them not to feel stressed or anxious or upset or derailed.
For them not to restrict their intake or modify their food behaviors for the rest of the day.
I think the goal would be for people to see the number and for it to just be a number.
Most of us don't get super caught up if we get our height measured.
It's like I'm 5'4, I don't get caught in that in the same way that I might stepping on a scale.
I think the goal is to eventually neutralize that number in a way where it's not going to start a cascade of negative thoughts, feelings or emotions.
Yeah, but if it is causing that cascade currently and you're working on your relationship with your body or with eating or with exercise, you might need a break for a while, and that's very reasonable.
Or forever, like me.
Yeah, so you could take a lifelong hiatus from this if you want to.
That's right.
I mean, the wonderful thing is you get to choose.
Yeah, absolutely.
So in conclusion here, when is a bathroom scale necessary?
Let's answer this question.
I think we have in some ways, but let's just put a fine point on it.
When is a bathroom scale necessary?
So I would say in very limited medical circumstances, like I touched on congestive heart failure, bathroom scale might be and is actually a pretty important tool.
And then otherwise, I really think it's up to you.
And whether or not you feel like your relationship with the scale is helpful or harmful.
So for me, I know the answer is, is a bathroom scale necessary?
The answer is no, never.
And that might be true for a lot of other people too.
And so I think what becomes most important is examining how your relationship is with that object in your house, how it impacts and affects you, and making the most positive grounded choice that you can for yourself.
But to me, honestly, very, very few people need to be stepping on a bathroom scale for their health on a daily or weekly basis.
What about you?
What do you think?
How would you summarize the, when is a bathroom scale necessary question?
Yeah, I would say never unless a health care provider tells you to get one because it's needed.
I don't love the idea that some marketing effort 120 years ago or 40 years ago told us to bring scales into our home, and so we all did it.
It's not that necessary to have that information at all.
So let's just throw all our bathroom scales out.
And if a doctor tells us that we need a bathroom scale, we can say why, and we can get a full understanding of what the rationale is.
And if it seems reasonable, then we can interact with that information.
But I would love to live in a world where this was not a product that most people had, that this was a niche product for people who loved data so much that they really wanted to have this.
But I don't think it's super helpful.
And I don't really buy the idea that these fancy new scales that have bioelectrical impedance and are sending data to your app about your lean body mass percentage versus your fat mass percentage is helpful.
I think it's just more of the same.
I think it's just more data that we think we have a ton of control over, but we actually don't.
And so we spend our days toiling to change something that's kind of out of our reach, truly, and is not as effectual on our health as we think it is.
And so I'd like to kind of wipe the slate, if we can.
Yeah, no, I guess we've decided we're in charge, so let's go wipe the slate.
Okay, well, if you're listening and you disagree with us, cool.
Awesome.
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