Wednesday, April 01, 2009

Are you being seduced by your scale?


Further to my post yesterday on scale addiction, today I'll be writing about scale seduction.

Scale seduction is often an insidious problem. You start your "diet" and begin to lose weight and bolstered by the sweet nothings the scale whispers in your ear you slowly get stricter and stricter with your dietary and/or exercise regimes. Basically watching those numbers go down seduces you into thinking you've found a lifestyle when in fact you've just on a diet.

Overly restrictive diets, regardless of weight loss, are generally doomed to fail when you finally get sick of the restrictions you don't particularly enjoy. When does that happen? Usually when the scale stops whispering its sweet nothings.

Remember, it isn't really about what you weigh, it's about what you're doing about what you weigh. Getting sucked into using the scale as your arbiter of success is risky business.

For the Star Wars fans out there consider the scale the "dark side" of the force. Powerful, seductive, but ultimately very dangerous.