Weight Loss Trick: Switch Your Scale

While working at losing weight, there is a very important emotional component to the process.  The first step towards weight loss is the emotional choice that you have, perhaps reluctantly, come to a point where you need to lose weight. If this emotion is strong enough, you embark on the process. As you start diligently working at weight loss, you often lose a large bit of weight relatively quickly. You cut out pop, reduce portion size, eat more salads, and just generally eat better. Suddenly the weight seems to be flying off. That goes for a while and your emotions drive the process. Success breeds success. But at some point you will likely hit a plateau, a place where the weight loss slows or may even stop. Even though you remain diligent, you just can't lose any more weight, or so it would seem. Every morning you stare at the scale and the number remains the same. This goes on for a while and seeing that same number every morning bums you out. You now associate that plateau weight with failure and often this weight is somewhere near some emotional metric (ie. "that's my weight when I graduated from high school"). 

Little did you know that the ticket out of that disempowering rut is right at your finger tips. Most of the bathroom scale that I have seen have a Pound-Kilogram switch. By switching to the other unit of measurement, you take that emotional number and turn it back into a relative figure of merit. As an American, I am accustom to using pounds as my unit of weight. While I can easily make the conversion in my head, I simply don't think in terms of kilograms. My weight in pounds makes sense and like I said earlier, there are certain emotional metrics along the way towards my goal and those weights in pounds also make sense. As an aside, I have long since given up at hitting my high school graduation weight again, as I topped out at over 100 lbs north of that. Even sitting here thinking about it, being 45.45 kg north doesn't emotionally compute. So back to the trick. Because there is so much emotion connected with that number, on a weight continuum that you all-to-well understand, changing to the other unit of measure turns the number into a simple figure of merit that doesn't have the emotional baggage and will help you get to the next level of weight loss. You still have to plot the next step in your weight loss plan, such as more exercise or whatever, but at least you don't carry around the albatross of your plateau weight. Going from pounds to kilos, cutting the numbers in half, might even have an odd buoyant effect on your mood. On a recent trip, we drove to Winnipeg from Southern MN. I understand miles, but when we got into Canada the kilometers just seemed to fly by and made it seem like we were "really making time". It is, of course, all illusory but anything that helps is good. Similarly, removing a bad emotion from the weight loss process is a good thing too.