Does your scale have you wrapped around its finger?
Seduction.
Who doesn't enjoy being seduced?
Flowers, a movie, cheesy late night, "no you hang up first" phone calls.....seductions are fun. But what if you knew in advance that the person who was successfully seducing you was a player? Would you react to their whispered sweet nothings differently?
For someone trying to lose weight, are there any sweet nothings sweeter than the sweet something the scale just told you that you've lost? But more to the point, despite those sweet somethings, is there anything more certain than the scale, sometimes at multiple points during a weight management effort, going dark?
Scale seduction, like a silver-tongued partner, is often an insidious problem. You start your hard-core "diet" and begin to lose weight, and the sweet somethings the scale whispers in your ear leads you to slowly get stricter and stricter with your dietary and/or exercise regimes.
Or worse, you start a realistic weight management effort, with no foods that are forbidden, where you rationally and wisely still allow yourself to choose food for both comfort and celebration....but when the scale goes dark, so too does your rational thought and suddenly you're adopting strategies you know you'll never sustain.
Remember that the more weight you'd like to permanently lose, the more of your life you'll need to permanently change, and so if your changes you make are the fruits of temporary knee-jerk strictnesses based on a suddenly dark scale, don't expect the resultant ill gotten sweet somethings to stick around.
Why won't they stick around? Because ultimately, overly restrictive, under-eating/over-exercising diets, regardless of weight loss, are doomed to fail when you finally get sick of the restrictions you don't particularly enjoy. When does that happen? Usually when the scale stops whispering sweet somethings for a few weeks in a row and you suddenly recognize that unless you're hearing the sweet somethings, the life you're living is just too damn hard to put up with.
Remember, it isn't really about what you weigh; it's about what you're doing about what you weigh. Getting sucked into using the scale as your arbiter of success is risky business.
Don't date a player.
[Next post I'll describe how I think scales can be used for good rather than evil]
