Women+Weight+Scales=PANIC!

I can barely remember when getting on a scale meant a “good” thing. It was about the time of age three or four. I was “growing,” so my height got measured every once in a while, too. Putting on weight was “healthy” growth.

The next time I heard the word “healthy” used in that manner was when my husband’s grandmother of blessed memory, who was quite nearly blind, put her hand on my thigh, and slapped and felt it in the way older women are justified to do, and said “I am glad you are a healthy girl.

Some time not long after that first time that putting on weight was good, it changed suddenly and completely. My mother did not see the contradiction that I told her about. I had to clean my plate. That was told me unequivocally everytime I sat down to eat. But when I was weighed, I was getting fat and it was bad. She acted as if she were totally blind to what to me was, even then, a stupid and obvious contradiction. I have since decided that the customs mothers live and pass on come from some mystical realm of logic, and have less to do with anything akin to reason than they do with some sort of mindless revelation validated by repetition and mimicking, probably of her mother, and so on back through an infinity of Jewish mothers. Not that I think this experience is particularly Jewish, or particularly ethnic in any way. If the patients I have seen (as well as the friends I have had) over the years are any indication,such messages about weight in general and the relationship of weight to food are as ubiquitous as air.

Usually it is a good idea to somehow try to work on changing the messages mothers implant, when they have caused this level of harm. I usually use emotional freedom technique. But even then, I feel obligated to tell women that weight is a complex and multi-factorial problem, and treatment is equally complex, but certainly does work. Maybe somebody will believe me now that I am sitting in an office (15) pounds lighter.

Still people seem to find it hard to believe me when I tell them the first thing I did was to stop weighing myself. Those numbers are worse than the worst slave masters. Virtually every woman I know, and I am certainly not talking even about women with eating disorders, I am still amazed at how difficult women find it to stop weighing themselves. I am, for the most part, not even talking about the truly obese; rather, those who struggle with a few pounds. They actually let the scale tell them how much to eat; something purely ridiculous when body weight fluctuates with water and the time of the month and the state of the digestion and multiple, multiple factors. They also let the scale tell them what their mood is, where their self esteem should be, and a thousand psychological things that are far, far more ridiculous.

So stop it. I vividly remember the horrible bathroom scale I was weighed on as a child. An ancient iron thing with a circular face and a metal pointer, that had probably not been calibrated since Moses crossed the Red Sea. It had served once, I think, in my grandmother’s store; it certainly looked that old. I remember the pain of standing on it and being told I was too fat and having no way at all to control or fight or do anything but cry when my mother talked to me about food. She was a large woman, and she seemed to have her own difficulties with the things we were discussing. That at least I could see.

So throw out your scale. It probably doesn’t work, anyway. If you can’t bring yourself to do that, then put it away in a closet. But whatever happens, it should not be used, ever, to weigh a woman. Now of course, people who come to doctors, especially anorectics, do really need to be weighed every once in a bit. Their doctor needs to know what they weigh; they do not, and for the most part, should not. I usually take such patients and back them on to the scale, heels first. Unless they are near death’s door and need hospitalization within the hour, such patients may expect to have me cheer them and applaud them if they weigh anything, and have eaten at all. I cheer and encourage the heavies no matter what. These are generalizations. As you can imagine, I do some pretty unpredictable things, and do not remember all that I do.

As for home, if someone really cannot throw out a scale, and wants to stand on one and see what it says, I would suggest such person write their ideal weight on a piece of paper and tape it over the part of the scale that is supposed to have a digital readout. After all, this is the easiest way to reclaim the power to control emotions that we have given to scales. To see such a label is only to laugh, perhaps, but I can think of no better reaction to the checking of weight than finding your ideal one and laughing.

There is a corollary of this. You will, yes will, reach your ideal weight. Sure, I have used some technologies and some tricks. But several years ago I started a “dream box” that even had a little journal in it, full of blank pages, where I wrote plenty of things. Most of them were affirmations and most of them have already come true. There are some pages, and we are talking nearly five years ago, where I wrote my ideal weight, again and again, over the entire page. I am within seven pounds of it now, and I am absolutely not complaining. I had heard from many soothsayer types, read in places; I do not know how to credit this one. But it seems to have worked. And at the time when I wrote it, I truly believed that I was not in possession of anywhere near the level of energy most women put into diets. My dramatic weight loss certainly did not include any use of traditional “diets.” But I wrote it and I wrote it and it happened, although it took some patience. I am certain other women besides me could have dream books or dream boxes, and it would not hurt them if a weight, a number, were an objective.

There is another element here which is the writing down of something multiple times. Repetition, in religious and spiritual rituals, is a cornerstone in every tradition known to me. Maybe it is not all that crazy, the way that schoolteachers of a certain era used to tell students to write things over and over and fill the page with them. In all the examples known to me, however, students wrote negative things, “I will not.” From looking at the amount of my own affirmations, multiply written, that have become true, I can only extrapolate that positive affirmations repeated in this way have some kind of power–and that the numbers of a human weight may have that self same power.

Recently, I visited with someone I see rarely, someone who went to prep school with me some years ago. She told me she felt sorry for how the other girls in prep school made fun of my size. I thanked her for her empathy, and told her prep school was no picnic, which it indeed was not. Now I am saying the truth. I didn’t notice it, do not remember, and did not care. I was “brain;” that was my role in prep school. Understanding what nobody else could understand, and doing what nobody else could do. Denial is vastly underrated as a defense mechanism. Many years later, working with a therapist who specialized in eating disorders, I was absolutely mortified when she asked me: “Didn’t being overweight ever bother you? Weren’t you scared to go places, or ashamed, or were there things you couldn’t or wouldn’t do?” She looked mortified when I answered her. “No.” I just didn’t give a damn what the scale said.  I tried damn hard to teach my patients the same thing, although it was clear I did not always succeed. I still remember, vividly, a woman science teacher who walked out on my anorexia group after informing me she had to keep watching the scale and it said two pounds more since my “treatment” so she could not do this. She did not think to revoke her informed consent so I told her primary care physician how worried I was after she walked out the door. At least I knew she wasn’t suicidal; she had promised me that often enough. But I also knew that her conditioning to scale reading was too strong for me to break it, and that there would be more such women.

Women are rarely so open about their attachment to the scale. I think that people I try to weigh without them knowing their own weight sneak glances most of the time. That is when they are not yelling at the top of their lungs, “I need to know!”

So I look back and I wonder how I avoided self-consciousness when I was small, and as I grew into a womanhood where nearly everyone else seems to have spent half their spare time worrying about being too fat to go out in public.

The answer is that whatever else my parents did, they did something so wonderful that I wish every set of parents did it for every child. They conveyed to me a sense of “specialness” so profound, that I was convinced nothing the culture–notably, the television–had to say could possibly apply to me. I was the “Wonder Woman;” the “brainchild;” the genius who drove the pediatrician insane and whom the superintendent of schools did not want anywhere in the public school system and ultimately expelled from same. Other children do not get this. I wore it like a cocoon. I think, for my parents, a lot of it was compensatory for me getting kicked out of places. But they had very high opinions of themselves, too, and I understand only now, with both of them dead as door nails and their lives closed books, what they wanted from me. They hitched me to the highest sense of sacred responsibility imaginable from the get-go. It drove me like the strongest supersonic motor. It did sometimes cause me pain, when I was imperfect in something I was supposed to be good at. If I failed an exam, it was a near death experience. Thank heaven I did not do it often, for the sense of intellectual achievement was euphoria generating. It was like a runner’s high without the running. I saw evidence of it around me in my daily life. I was supposed to be the woman who would save the world, like my namesake, the Biblical Queen Esther.

Unfortunately, the world’s first beauty contest winner, but I could ignore that as she was the woman who saved the people. Okay, I tried to believe my parents when they said great things were in store, but I had to tow the line. This remains the only story in the whole Bible that I know about where beauty is not seen as anything devious or treacherous, but rather, part of a woman’s system of virtue, more like the stuff in Proverbs. I mean, I think she was not only pretty but became a decent, fair, honorable queen, in contradistinction from her predecessors and competitors.I can almost see my parents smiling as I write that one.

The trick, then, is to give every woman a feeling of “specialness” that is strong enough to render her resistant to what her culture bombards her with while it is trying to drain her resources from her.

In my case, it took a combination of religion, a sense of responsibility, and this knowledge that I was some kind of a little “genius.” At schoolwork, which meant constant, daily reminders.

So the answer is that every woman must learn that her worth is philosophical and intellectual, and learn it well enough to know that it is more important than numbers on a machine beneath her feet. I always thought people should somehow be “licensed” to raise children, because it is such a difficult task. But who would determine who qualified? I know there are parenting classes, and I know that what they must teach rises slowly in levels. I doubt it could get to this one.

Special talents exist in everyone. I used to believe there were things that I was absolutely incapable of doing, like being an athlete; now I no longer believe that. I just think that I would have to work a lot harder to do this than someone would with natural talent.

It seems like a weak generalization, to end by saying that everyone can have a specialness given and identified and strengthened enough to become a buffer against social pressure. I do, however, believe that. It remains only to implement.