I have this overly informative scale.
Yes, I weigh myself every day. In the era when I did not (the Dark Years), I accumulated an astonishing amount of weight, seemingly out of nowhere. (You can make zooming space noises with that, if you like.)
On my Excel graph that shows my weight since 1997 (oh, come on – you knew I had one), there’s a big gap for the Dark Years. At the end of them, five years later, my weight was up more than 32 pounds. Ugly ugly ugly. Ignorance may be bliss, but it can be hell on the body fat.
I remember buying that scale, in 2002, coming back from a weekend in the mountains. I was starting to get those rolls of fat on my rib cage, you know? The ones where you really can’t pretend that it’s muscle or hip-spread. We stopped at a Bed, Bath and Beyond and I bought a simple scale that I step onto until I’d cut back on stuffing myself for a week. Thus I don’t really know how high it got. Clinging to my blissful ignorance.
That was two scales ago. Now I have this fancy/shmancy one that shows me not only my weight, but also my body fat percentage, muscle percentage, visceral fat percentage, metabolic rate and my metabolic age.
It’s the last one that really kills me.
Oh, my weight is still too high – about six pounds over the high end of my BMI. My body fat is in the “overfat” arena, which is tremendously annoying. But, to add insult to injury, this scale tells me, every damn day that I’m three to four years older than I am.
Even if I kick her.
Oh, it’s not as bad as it has been. At a couple of points in time (Dark Months), she had me over 50. We’ve bargained it down from there. But she still insists that, metabolically, fattily, I’m older than I am.
Otherwise, I’m a youthful person. I come from a family of youthful women. People say I look younger than I am. I admit I have ego tied up in it.
So, while it’s nice to see my weight come down, the body fat percentage decrease, what really makes my day is when I lose a year overnight. I feel like Merlin, aging backwards, growing younger.
I’m not really inclined towards anorexia, but I could see wanting to keep working to peel those years away. Erasing the pounds until I’m a sweet, young thing again.
Eh, who am I kidding?
I’ll be happy to shake the “overfat” insult.