Scale Drama

I pride myself on being all engineery and anaytical, but the scale reduces me to an obsessive moron.  I have never cried over the number, but obsess and worry and eat cookies (or cupcakes) because of the number that pops up on that horrible little contraption, yup been there.  That is why I swore off the scale last month...and then promptly reneged, not just because I have ZERO willpower, but because I keep reading fitness books that say you need that little number (or big number in my case) in your arsenal of measurements.  Of course this is supposed to be taken in with the context of body measurements and how your clothes fit, but that number was my undoing last week.

So back to engineery me...I am the chick that reads the "oh my god I gained 1-2 lbs this week, this diet isn't working" and rolls my eyes. Don't they know that scale weight means everything that your body is composed of, including the water and the poo.  Don't they know how many extra calories you need to consume to actually gain a pound of fat.  Well I have been doing NROLW (New rules of Lifting for women) and I LOVE it.  Lifting heavy weights is awesome!!!  But lifting weights can also make you retain water as your muscles repair themselves (chemistry stuff about glycogen and water ratio's and what not).  So it probably wasn't a good idea to set my weighin date for Thursday when I lift on Wednesday's. Moral of the story, up 4 lbs at weighin.  The analytical me said "it's just water weight, you didn't eat nearly enough to gain 4 lbs in one week" however crazy obsessive me said "OH MY GOD THAT'S INSANE, you need a crash diet right now, how about a cleanse, you just undid 2 months of work, you suck, weightlifting sucks- you must stop" and I proceeded to hop on the scale every 16.5 minutes to see if it went away.

By Sunday I still carrying my lovely extra weight around and still freaking out about it when I noticed that although I had only had 1 cup of coffee, I was heading to the bathroom every 30 minutes.  This made me completely estatic!!! Yay, my analytical brain was right, the water is finally leaving and the next day my weight was exactly what it should have been.  Lesson 1.  Don't weighin after weight lifting.  Lesson 2.  Ditch the scale - let the trainer measure body fat and weight once/month.

I still struggle with ditching the scale.  I mean how else would I have known that the crazy CATZ workouts that left me sitting in my car wondering how I could possibly drive home, resulted in zero fatloss (not just based on the scale-my measurements didn't change either).  No point in nearly killing myself for no gain.  I also would never have known that I lost 1.5 pounds while on a cruise (which brought about my new move more movement).  I think now that I can see a consistent downward trend (omitting the 4 lbs of water debacle from last week), maybe now is a good time to really let go of the scale for a while.