“She remembered who she was, and the game changed.” ~Lalah Delia
The scale. Those dreaded words and those dreaded numbers. It can strike fear in the heart of any generally happy person. People look at guidelines and BMI charts and often think, “It should be lower.”
Have you ever been having a perfectly good day and suddenly thought, “Maybe I should weigh myself?” And just like that, the day is ruined. How do we let a bathroom scale dictate how we feel about ourselves?
One woman recalls stepping on the scale and seeing numbers that somehow determined how she valued herself. She calls it a ridiculous way to measure worth, yet so many people do it. Somewhere along the way, many start believing that if they weigh less, they somehow are more.
She grew up in the 1990s, remembering being told she should weigh 120 pounds. That number became something she chased for years. She weighed herself every day. She didn’t care if she had energy or if she felt good. What mattered was the number on the scale.
All around her, the message was the same: do more, eat less, weigh less. People would compliment the weight loss, not realizing she was often starving and exhausted. It never made sense.
Around that time, she took up running after the loss of her grandmother. The endorphins gave her a positive way to deal with grief. But then, as good things often do, it became something negative. She also realized it made her smaller. For whatever reason, that made her feel better.
So for many years, she learned that if she ran enough and ate little enough, she could stay small. She remembers being told in her early twenties that her body fat was too low. At the time, she wore that like a badge of honor.
Life changed things. After four pregnancies, the number on the scale became harder to control. Each time her weight crept up, she would return to running to try to bring the number back down. After each pregnancy it became harder.
Even when she added strength training, it wasn’t about building strength. It was about burning more calories. Everything revolved around pleasing the number on the scale. She never considered if she was getting stronger.
Then something unexpected happened. After a fall from her horse injured her ankle, she wasn’t able to run the way she used to. Instead, she started strength training from a different place. She wasn’t training to burn calories. She was training to be strong.
She wanted to lift things. Move things. Feel capable in her body. And then something strange started happening. People began telling her she looked like she had lost weight. But when she stepped on the scale, the number hadn’t gone down. In fact, it had gone up.
She remembers thinking, “That’s odd… my scale says this, but my old jeans fit again.” Slowly, it dawned on her. Maybe the scale wasn’t telling the whole story.
For years she believed the scale told the truth about her health. What she eventually realized is that it was only telling her how much gravity was pulling on her body that morning. It couldn’t measure strength. It couldn’t measure muscle. It couldn’t measure how capable her body had become.
As a nurse practitioner, she does still weigh patients in her clinical practice. Weight trends can matter in certain situations, and sometimes it helps guide medical decisions. But that number was never meant to determine whether someone should have a good day.
It doesn’t measure resilience. It doesn’t measure energy. It doesn’t measure confidence or strength.
What frustrates her most is realizing that the same narrative she grew up with is still alive and well. She sees it in her adolescent patients. She sees it in the media her children are exposed to.
Boys are often encouraged to become stronger and more capable. A higher number on the scale is even to be celebrated if it means they are building muscle. Girls often hear a different message. Smaller is better. She works daily to change that narrative. She wants her daughters and all girls to know that stronger is better.
She tries to remind them of something she wishes she had understood earlier: our bodies are meant to be strong, healthy, and capable. Strength is something we build, not something we shrink ourselves into.
She remembers when that bathroom scale could determine what kind of day she was going to have. The number could jump up five pounds overnight from hormones or water retention.
Now she sees it differently. If she is going to focus on a number, she’d rather focus on the amount of weight she can lift. The number on her deadlift. The number on her squat. The number on her bench press.
Those numbers tell a much more meaningful story. They represent effort, consistency, and progress that actually reflect the work being done. And maybe the day people stop letting the scale decide their worth is the day they finally start appreciating what their bodies are truly capable of.
This perspective is part of a larger conversation about health metrics. Many health professionals now emphasize holistic measures of well-being over a single number. They point to factors like cardiovascular fitness, flexibility, mental health, and blood markers as better indicators of health. The focus is shifting from weight to overall metabolic health and functional ability, which a simple scale cannot capture.
