Use Measurements Besides the Scale
What's So Motivating About Numbers Anyway?
-- By Mike Kramer, SparkPeople Contributor
Pretend for a minute that gravity doesn’t exist. Everything is weightless, including your aunt Sophie, yet it all manages to stay on the ground. You don’t know how much you weigh because scales have never been invented. How would you define your state of health? After all, you wouldn’t be able to say "I need to lose 10 pounds" or "I weigh 150 pounds, so I must be overweight."
What would be your benchmark? You might still not like how you look. You might be tired of being tired all the time. You might need to trim down and take care of that blood pressure problem. You might want to avoid diabetes.
In a gravity-free world, those are all still good reasons to create healthy diet and fitness habits. Who knows, you might decide "Hey, I feel all right, I look all right, and I’m healthy. If I can just maintain the habits I have, I should be okay."
The point is, you can decide for yourself what shape you’re in. You don’t need the scale to tell you. Unfortunately, many times we get down on ourselves simply because something as trivial as gravity tells us we’re out of shape. Some people feel and look fantastic in every respect, but if the number on the scale doesn’t match expectations, they’re miserable. This doesn’t make sense. Gravity should not be able to wield that kind of power.
