The scale

I am one of those people who not only does not own a scale but I forget that other people have them...and weigh themselves regularly? What's that about?

I have a terrible little story to tell you.
My father, when I was around eight or nine, decided that I was too fat. He told me that no one liked people who are fat and sad; I probably looked sad because he had just told me I was fat. He said people like to be around happy, beautiful people (obviously fat people aren't beautiful...thanks dad).
Anyway, he told me that every time he picked me up and took me to his house for a visit, that he was going to weigh me to see if I had lost any weight. He also told me that whenever he had me that I would be on a diet.

So as soon as humanly possible (it wasn't long) I stopped going over to his house. I realized that he was a...uh, a bad influence, we'll say, pretty early on.

This may have something to do with why no scale and why it never occurs to me to know how much I weigh. But it seems wrong to blog about weight loss without having some sort of quantifiable record of Success. You see those tickers all the time: the ones with a storm cloud on one side, over your starting weight and a rainbow and a pile of money and happiness on the other side over your goal weight. I don't seem to have one of those because I lack a starting weight (though I have a guess), I do not have a bathroom scale, and uh, I also lack a goal weight...it's more like a goal area, give or take twenty pounds.
I guess I already suck at blogging weight loss. But I persevere!

I am taking measurements. I may even post them if I feel particularly brave. There's something so much more visceral, real, 3D about measurements than a simple number on a screen. After all, do you know what 267 pounds looks like on this 33-year-old Mexican chick who is 5'9" and a bit muscly? I thought not. But you probably know that 55 inches is a lot of inches for a body measurement.
I am also taking pictures but considering that I took my first set myself in poor lighting using my laptop camera...I might wait until I can get a friend of mine to do a photo shoot in a week and post those instead. It's good to hang in the artist community; services for trade :)

There are a lot of benefits I bet, to having a scale. I would be able to track my progress with a graph. I like graphs. I would be able to weigh other stuff in my apartment, including my cat. Maybe her complete lack of concern for her weight would rub off on me.
And that's my real concern about getting a scale: I don't want to become numbers obsessed in all this. Until I weighed myself out of curiosity at someone else's house a few weeks ago, I had no idea what I might weigh. No clue. And now I think about that number all the time. 267. 267? 267, hmm. But not because I think it is WAAAY higher than I thought it would be or lower than I thought it might be...I just had had no idea what my weight was. The numbers, as numbers often are, are just so abstract. The way my clothes fit is real; I can understand that. How my ass looks in my underpants—I get that, that's real to me. And the fact that I can run upstairs without breaking a sweat. Rad.
But I can see how I might get sucked into the numbers game. I already sort of have become a bit too concerned with my daily caloric intake and weighing my food. I know that it's important to watch that but I almost feel like when I hit my target intake of food for the day that I should get a pat on the back, "Praise me, PRAISE ME!" even though I am only doing it for myself. How much worse will that be tracking my numeric weight loss?

To scale or not to scale?