2861: Scale Obsessed by Jessi Kneeland on How to Reclaim Control over Your Health Journey

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[00:01:15] How often do you weigh yourself? Too often. While I've had this exact same conversation with clients hundreds of times over the years, a client, let's call her Zuri, said these words to me again a few months ago. She was blushing, embarrassed to admit something, quote, so stupid. I responded, how often? She responded, three times a day on a good day, up to six or ten on a bad day, sometimes more.

[00:01:42] The interesting thing is that Zuri is a personal trainer. She's intimately aware of the science of fat loss because she helps clients with it all the time. She knows you can't gain weight by having a big snack or meal, and she knows fluctuations throughout the day only reflect changes in water weight or digestion or bathroom timing, not fat. But still, three times a day at least, Zuri gets on a scale to find out, quote, how she's doing.

[00:02:11] To find out if she, quote, ate too much. She'll use the scale to determine what kind of mood she should be in, how she should feel about herself, and how much food she can eat the rest of the day. If you're thinking this is some crazy behavior, I encourage you not to push Zuri's story away and otherize it. Obsessive body checking may not be healthy, but it is sadly pretty normal.

[00:02:36] Way more people than you would ever realize are doing it, constantly aware of and obsessed by the micro changes in their weight, size, shape, appearance, or health. Plus, all of us have our own coping and numbing behaviors. Maybe instead of weighing yourself, you scroll Instagram endlessly, or online shop, or binge eat. In some ways, it's all the same.

[00:03:00] Also, if you're thinking, OMG, I'm Zuri, I encourage you to hold this fact with curiosity and compassion as you hear this. You are not crazy or abnormal. The first step I take with a client in this situation is to acknowledge that they have come to believe the number on the scale has power. At a certain point in their development, they learned that this number was important, that it held great significance, and that without it,

[00:03:27] they would be thrust into a terrifying world of out-of-controlness and danger. When I asked Zuri what would happen if she stopped weighing herself, she said, I don't know. I feel like I would die. After years or decades of checking this number constantly, the discomfort of giving it up can be so great, it feels practically unsurvivable. The thing about compulsive habits is that no matter why they start, at a certain point,

[00:03:55] they turn to superstition, to a feeling that without doing them, everything will crumble. So, we make space for how uncomfortable and vulnerable this is, for how dangerous it feels to be in charge of her life, her day, her body, without knowing the number. The next steps are always the same. Give it up and deal with the fallout. Give it up and fight, day by day, to deal with whatever arises in the absence of the compulsive behavior.

[00:04:23] Give it up and sort through the vulnerability, the feelings, the thoughts, the stories. What has weighing yourself been distracting you from? What has it been helping you not feel or think about? Because really, your work will be to face that thing, not to make it go away, mind you, but face it head-on and learn to tolerate it, integrate it, accept it, and deal with it, whatever it might be.

[00:04:47] For some clients, that means acknowledging extraordinary loneliness, or anger, or grief. For others, it's the deep sense that something in their life is wrong, or broken, and needs to be changed or mended. Sometimes it brings up intense stuff around gender, intimacy, attention, or safety. When Zuri stopped weighing herself, she discovered she felt terrified by the sheer volume of her own feelings.

[00:05:13] A few days after throwing away her scale, Zuri told me these feelings were, quote, too big, too big to bear, like she might die. But something kind of magical happened in our sessions around then. Up until this point, after about five weeks of working together, she had only wanted to talk about her body, her weight, and her messed up relationship to food, and fat, and exercise. Once she stopped weighing herself, we started talking about her feelings instead.

[00:05:41] Now we talk about her anger at her husband, her slow, simmering resentment and loneliness, and his gradual withdrawal of intimacy over the years. We talk about her feelings of conflict about her work in the fitness industry, and whether she's making the world better or worse. We talk about her losses, the children she had not been able to carry to term, a dear friend who ended their friendship without saying why, the loss of her parents.

[00:06:07] We talk about boundaries and desires, and fatphobia activism, and self-care. In short, once we stopped talking about Zuri's weight, we started talking about her life. Already through this work, Zuri is learning to identify and tolerate her feelings more, and to notice what's really going on with her emotionally during the bad body image moments, when she's dying to bust her scale out of the attic, so that she can deal with the truth directly,

[00:06:37] instead of dealing with a distraction. What I know to be true is that with time and practice, and courage, Zuri will learn that her feelings aren't dangerous, and they'll start to get quieter and more neutral. She may still want to be thin and in control, but the volume and intensity of those feelings will go down, and she'll be able to view them with curiosity and distance, instead of experiencing them like a hurricane. We all turn to coping mechanisms when we're outside our

[00:07:05] window of tolerance for feeling uncomfortable things. It's why we naturally want to get drunk, or eat a tub of ice cream when we go through a breakup. If you have a small window of what feelings you can tolerate, you're going to need a lot of coping mechanisms, and odds are, pretty good, they won't all be healthy. What happens for a lot of my clients is that coping mechanisms, like weighing themselves, dieting, binging, or body monitoring, have actually prevented them from increasing the size of their window of tolerance,

[00:07:34] so they can barely tolerate anything. Only when they give up those habits do they have the opportunity to feel everything, and deal with it, and expand that window, so that daily life doesn't feel so scary and overwhelming. So maybe you don't weigh yourself all the time like Zuri did. Maybe your coping behavior includes wine, or marijuana, or online shopping, or scrolling endlessly through social media, or gambling, or reckless, or constant busyness.

[00:08:03] Maybe it's dieting, starving yourself, binging, exercise obsession, or an inability to stop stressing about how you look. But make no mistake, if you're relying on any coping behavior like this to help yourself feel safe, or in control, or good enough, you are avoiding something. And until you identify and directly face whatever that thing is, you will always find yourself struggling with the feeling that something outside of you,

[00:08:30] such as the scale, or other people's opinions of you, is controlling your life. You just listened to the post titled, Scale Obsessed, by Jesse Neeland, of jesseneeland.com, and I'll be right back with my commentary. Have you ever wondered if your calendar age truly reflects your body's health? I'm passionate about taking control of my well-being, which is why I joined 23andMe Plus Total Health, a revolutionary longevity platform

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[00:10:28] Dr. Neil here for my commentary. If you find that you or someone you know tends to exhibit the behaviors that Jessie described in her post, speaking to a healthcare professional can be really beneficial. Jessie has had some amazing success stories with her clients. But I'm sure there were times when it seemed like the person just couldn't be helped. It happens. That's when it can be really helpful to speak or refer them to a healthcare professional that specializes in mental health like a psychologist, a psychiatrist,

[00:10:58] or a marriage and family therapist. Now I know I sound like a commercial right now but I swear these words are coming from me. Mental health professionals exist to help individuals with these very issues. That's their job. That's why they got into this field. This is what they're trained to do. So again, if the story Jessie shared sounded like you or someone you know, share this episode with them and gently encourage them to seek some care. All right, that'll do it for today.

[00:11:26] I'll see you back here tomorrow where optimal life awaits. take care of yourself and use it for you. But I know but you see