stepping onto the scale, stepping out of my comfort zone

the anxiety I felt getting weighed at the doctor's office

happy wednesday!

The below essay is a Part 2 to my previous piece about my toxic love affair with my scale. If you haven’t read that one yet, I encourage you to do so. It gives a lot of context to the thoughts and experiences I share in this essay. And if this essay resonates with you, please share it.

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Take good care of yourself this week!

ILY, Julie

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stepping onto the scale, stepping out of my comfort zone

TW: I talk about some of my specific eating disorder behaviors and body dysmorphia below. If that could be potentially triggering to you in any way, feel free to skip the rest of this piece. I also want to note that I am not an eating disorder provider, and everything in this newsletter is my perspective as someone in recovery.

There can be a twisted sense of comfort in knowing your enemy really well. You know what you’re up against. You can predict their moves. You can anticipate how they will make you feel, what insecurities they’ll instigate. Your relationship and the knowledge you have about them is a tool you can use in your favor to protect yourself.

That’s how I felt about my scale: I knew it as intimately as it knew me. Despite the intense anxiety I felt every time I stepped onto it, I was also soothed by my learned ability to understand where on the bathroom floor it needed to rest or which clothes I needed to wear or how little water I could drink throughout the day to produce the smallest number. No weigh-in on my scale was ever that surprising, because I weighed myself on it every day, multiple times a day. We had a consistent rapport.

And even though I was at the mercy of the number my scale showed me each morning, I still felt like I was the one in control (and that’s called delusion, baby). I felt as though I was making the choice to get on it. I could comfortably predict the number it’d show me. And the best part: it was a private affair.

But getting weighed at the doctor’s office felt — and to this day, feels — completely different. Stepping on a scale that isn’t mine, while another person tells me to keep my shoes on, manipulates the calibration and then records the number they see in a manila folder file forever? Hell no. Hell. no.

As any person with a history of obsessing over their weight can tell you, no scale is the same. And one scale might not show you exactly the same number as another. I was downright terrified of those large doctor’s office scales. The ones with metal plates that need to be slid across so the arrow hovers in the middle. I hated them because they were open to interpretation, usually the nurse’s interpretation. The nurse would sometimes round it up or down. They’d never record the 0.3 pound that absolutely mattered to me. They’d never make me step on it more than once just to make sure they got it completely right. I was irritated by what I perceived as their inattention to detail or carelessness for getting it right.

Any slight difference between what my scale at home told me I weighed in the morning and what the doctor’s office scale told me I weighed later the same day sent me into a quiet spiral. Whether I was there for my yearly physical or a sore throat and a fever, my doctor’s words were always drowned out by my internal debate of what my true weight really was. Which scale should I believe? What if they were both wrong? I’d ask myself, how could the numbers be so different?

It was there, in those moments at the doctor’s office, where I could *sort of* see just how flawed the metric I used to define my worth and beauty was. But rather than seeing those number discrepancies as proof that weight is an inaccurate indicator of health or beauty, I interpreted it as: my body is flawed because it doesn’t weigh the same on every scale.

Up until going to residential eating disorder treatment (at the age of 24), I had no idea that I didn’t have to know my weight. I didn’t know that I could look away from the scale, or ask the nurse to not tell me the number, or not even get weighed at all. The first time someone told me that I could do any of those things, I was shocked.

Before getting admitted to residential eating disorder treatment, I had to get a complete physical from my local primary care doctor. I had to get bloodwork, an EKG, a bone density scan, among other tests. Of course, I’d have to get weighed. My therapist had convinced me to not step on the scale so often in the lead-up to my admittance, so ahead of my physical, we practiced the line: “Please don’t tell me my weight. This physical is so I can be admitted to eating disorder treatment. ” The nurse obliged. And yet, when I went up to the receptionist to pay my co-pay, I was handed a big packet of health information, with my weight in big black bold numbers on the very front page.

I cried the whole drive home, as I kept one eye on the road and one eye on those papers scattered on the passenger seat. I thought: how was I ever going to get better if every time I tried to do something to help myself, I was reminded of why I found myself in this situation in the first place.

The weight of it all felt so suffocating.

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