Saturday, May 20, 2017

Anxiety & Relief

Today I got a new digital bathroom scale delivered from Amazon - purchased in large part because my previous scale has been giving an Error message since mid-November, meaning that I'd passed the dreaded line into numbers beginning with 3 (older bathroom scales didn't go higher than that). I kept thinking that surely my weight would dip back down and I'd see an actual number again, but it hadn't happened since the January 31st weigh-in, which gave me 297 right after the liquid fast and purge for my colonoscopy the week before. Other than that, it's been all "ER" since November 20th.

Finally, the anxiety of having no idea how much more than 299.5 I weighed conquered the fear of seeing some horrific number, and I ordered a better one with a higher limit - because how can you monitor or motivate yourself when you can't even know if you're losing or gaining unless you drop back into the scale's range?! Given that it's been nearly 6 months of error messages, I was imagining that my weight was still climbing upwards - 310, 320, who knows how far I'd gone?!

So today the scale arrived, I unpacked it and put the batteries in, and fired it up. And much to my relief, it only said 303. (Yes, I know: "only.") I've obviously been hovering right in that just-above-300 range all winter/spring rather than continuing to gain. That's just 7 pounds ahead of where I was in May last year, which at least doesn't indicate a catastrophic spin out of control. Of course, though, the relief is mixed with the sinking feeling that this must be my body's new set point that I don't exceed but also have trouble dropping below - like the 280-285 set point I used to have 5-10 years ago. I'm hoping that actually being able to see numbers again will be helpful in motivation, though.