I haven’t weighed myself in five months. Mostly it’s because our bathroom scales are hidden away, squished up with other belongings during our house remodel. But still, I’m sure I could have found a way to weigh, so to speak, if I had wanted to. I’m relatively interested in other indicia about myself: blood pressure, lab test results, visual acuity, and the state of my teeth and gums. But weight? No so much.
Body weight was never an issue when I was a child. I was an active tree-climbing, bike-riding, lake-swimming kid. By age 10 or 11, my parents bought me my first horse, and I was a devoted barn rat for most of my teenage years.
And then came college. Unlimited cafeteria food, late night pizza and beer parties, and 4:00 a.m. donut runs after all-night study sessions. The Freshman 15 hit me fast and hard. But I thought the weight gain – my formidable new adversary – was something to conquer and eliminate; I had no idea that I was waging a war that would last for decades.
My initial naïve approach to weight loss was calorie counting. I reviewed food labels, measured portions, planned menus, and tallied calories. I bought low-calorie salad dressing, drank diet sodas, and limited myself to skim milk in coffee. I watched my carbs and read, with enthusiasm, highly regarded diet books; I tried everything they had to offer. The diets worked – for a while. But eventually the pounds would creep back with apparent eagerness. My self-esteem plummeted exponentially with every increase on the scales.
As the years went by, my life became more complex: law school, marriage, career, family, and volunteerism. I felt happy, energetic, and productive. But my obsession with my weight was always hovering in the background, like an interminable drone in the distance.
Exercise became my secret weapon. I added aerobics, jogging, Pilates, and walking to an already-ambitious life load. Consistency was always a challenge, but I struck an uneasy alliance between what my body looked like versus how I thought it should look.
In 2010, I stopped all the workout pledges, promises, and aspirations and decided to exercise for at least 30 minutes every single day. That commitment extinguished the endless planning and the exhausting effort of discipline, and, most importantly, it removed the relentless guilt-tripping when I failed to work out.
Magically, my weight gently and gracefully stabilized, much like a little boat settling into calming waters after the wind dies down. It’s not just the extra calories that I burn by regular exercise. Exercise combats stress and reduces anxiety. I don’t turn to food to comfort myself when life pushes me off-kilter like I did in the past.
The remodel is over, and I’ll find those bathroom scales and dust them off. I’ll get on the scales and weigh myself. Or maybe not. I’ve entered a season of peaceful accord with my weight, and it’s a truce that I think will last a lifetime.