Breaking my obsession with numbers was honestly the best thing I could have ever done for myself, my self-esteem and my weight loss journey. When I was trying to lose weight, I used to weigh myself literally every day and break out the tape measure on Sundays. Rain, hail or shine, I was measuring myself! When I wasn’t actively trying to lose weight and I knew I hadn’t been ‘behaving’ of course I didn’t weight myself then, I wasn’t that silly. That would have been a surefire way to send my self-esteem plummeting in a downwards spiral for goodness-only-knows how long.

On a weight loss journey, it is pretty stock standard to want to track your progress. There are so many numbers we could track it is not even funny! Body weight, dress size, the circumference of various body parts, body mass index, body fat, calories in food, calories in exercise, base metabolic rate…the list goes on ad infinitum depending on how obsessive we allow ourselves to be. Where does it really end?

With me it ended in body dysmorphia, anxiety and complete disconnection from my body’s natural cues. Feeling terrible about myself unless I ran further, ate less and weighed less than the day before. And you could have told me until you were blue in the face that body weight doesn’t take into account water retention, muscle weight, hormones, blah blah blah. My self-worth was still tied to the numbers. Cue the extremely pointless depression!

Fast forward a few years and these days I’m lucky if I weigh and measure myself once every few months. And I have never felt better about myself. My self-worth is no longer a number on a scale or an increment on the measuring tape. My self-worth comes in part from having a strong relationship with myself, plenty of understanding, taking care of my physical health in a non-obsessive way, building up lots of healthy habits, positive self-talk. Not only can a scale not measure those things, it can’t measure how good your sleep is, how much energy you have, how good your digestion and skin are, how balanced your emotions are.

If you are just focused on the numbers, what are you missing out on?