ALLURE: I compulsively weighed myself for 2 years - Here’s how I stopped

I had forgotten about the scale under my bathroom sink. But when I walked into my bathroom one recent morning, there it was, covered in a thin layer of dust and underneath my boyfriend’s bare feet.

He was almost giddy to weigh himself because, as he told me, it was morning and that’s when you weigh the least in the day. Of course, I was already well aware of that.

I wasn't going to look. But I couldn't help it. I stole a glance down and glimpsed the number as it flashed across the display.

I had a quiet suspicion I weighed more than him. I vividly recall a moment I held one of his shirts up against my chest and thought, “My right tit wouldn’t fit in this.” That morning, a cold, hard number confrmed what I thought.

But it wasn’t the number that shook me. It was the memories of the countless times I had stood on that scale that came flooding back when I saw it on my bathroom floor.

For years, weight loss had been a personal measure of success — and an elusive one. Never mind my master’s degree and rapid professional ascent. No, in my mind, it was the number on the scale that told me how well I was really doing. And despite my active lifestyle from childhood through my late twenties, that number was never what I wanted it to be.

That deep insecurity about my weight spilled over into my dating life, too, making me self-conscious instead of confident. Like many other women, I had been indoctrinated with the stereotype that desirable women are smaller than men. Disney movies, rom coms, and even Saturday morning cartoons portrayed the ideal woman as light and wieldy. A man can just scoop her up. She's tiny — practically weightless. She’s always the little spoon.

Over time, my routine of weighing myself once a week became a compulsion to step on the scale once a day. Once a day became twice a day. Twice a day eventually turned into three and sometimes four, depending on how often I encountered a scale. When I saw one, I had to use it, whether at the gym, a friend’s house, or my chiropractor’s office.

I bought a pricey-as-hell digital scale for more precision and became obsessed with watching the pounds and fractions of pounds fluctuate from morning to afternoon, analyzing why or how my weight varied over the course of a day. I wanted to observe in real time the effects of how much I ate for lunch, those extra 15 minutes at the gym, even a longer-than-usual pee. I was trying to crack a code.

I’ve never been officially diagnosed with an eating disorder of any kind, which may be simply because I was too scared to talk to anyone about what I was doing — especially a doctor. (Most doctors I had seen emphasized weight loss above almost any other indicator of my health.) On some level, I believed putting my compulsion into words would make it a real problem. But it already was. My relationship with the scale was undoubtedly disordered.

And it took time to shake. Eventually, I started to meet other women and athletes — I'd been a rugby player for years — who accepted their glorious bodies in all sizes and shapes. I tried a yoga class that got me hooked, and soon my appreciation for my body's mastery of wheel variations began to crowd out some of my fixation on how much it weighed.

I discovered clothing that showcased my body instead of hiding it and recognized how amazing bigger bodies can look in clothes of all kinds, even crop tops. Especially crop tops.

I found body-positive physicians and a therapist who doesn't believe the myth that you need to be thin to be healthy, as many care providers unfortunately still do.

And I dated men, like my partner, who are genuinely attracted to me — not in spite of my body, but for everything I am. I came to realize that fat women aren’t a joke, a fetish, or a "before" picture just waiting to become an "after." They are sexy, desirable, and worthy of love just as they are. And so am I.

I had been weighing myself at every opportunity for over two years by the time I stopped. It dawned on me, slowly and then all at once, that I simply couldn’t look at the number on the scale without using it to measure my worth. I cut back gradually at first, weighing myself less often at home. Then I found the courage to tell health care providers I preferred not to be weighed during visits and check-ups. It’s been over seven years since I’ve seen my weight on a scale, and over that time, I’ve remained the exact same size.

Seeing my guy on the scale that morning was a reminder of my old life — the life in which I was desperate to be as thin as possible, always smaller than the men I dated, forever the little spoon.

But it was also a reminder of my new life as a woman who can just be the size she is with the partner she has, without shame or apology. I took a deep breath and smiled at my partner, and we went on with our morning. I eventually told him the story of the scale and what it meant to me to see him on it — not to discourage him from weighing himself in front of me, but so he could get to know the woman he's dating a little bit better.

Even now, some days are dark and awful and I am downright horrible to myself when I look in the mirror. But more often than not, I am celebrating the person I’ve become.

Because I'm no longer the girl who cut out the tags in her clothes for fear someone would see them, as if she was tricking anyone into thinking she wasn't really plus-size. Now, I’m the woman who can joke with her partner when he mistakenly takes home a pair of her pants thinking they're his — because, despite his sexy soccer-player ass, he simply doesn’t have enough booty to fill out my jeans.

I'm the woman who believes my partner loves me and my body, whether I'm the little or big spoon. But even more than that, I'm the woman who believes in her own worth — and that the number on the scale has nothing to do with it.

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