All the Important Things a Scale Can’t Measure

“She remembered who she was, and the game changed.” ~Lalah Delia

The scale. Those dreaded words and those dreaded numbers. It can strike fear in the heart of any generally happy human. We look at guidelines and BMI charts and always think, “It should be lower.”

Have you ever been having a perfectly good day and suddenly think, “Maybe I should weigh myself?” And just like that, your day is ruined.

How do we let a $20 bathroom scale dictate how we feel about ourselves?

I remember stepping on the scale and seeing numbers that somehow determined how I valued myself. What a ridiculous way to measure our worth. Yet so many of us do it. Somewhere along the way we start believing that if we weigh less, we somehow are more.

I grew up in the 1990s, and I remember being told that I should weigh 120 pounds. Thank you, Seventeen Magazine and the fashion industry. Granted, I’m not tall. But that number became something I chased for years. I weighed myself religiously every day. I didn’t care if I had energy or if I felt good. What mattered was the number on the scale. If I could just reach that elusive number, all would be right with the world.

All around me, the message was the same: do more, eat less, weigh less. If I could just reach that number, somehow, I would become the most worthy version of myself.

People would complement the weight loss, not realizing that I was often starving and exhausted. I felt terrible, but the number on the scale was good. It never made sense.

Around that time, I had taken up running after the loss of my grandmother. The endorphins gave me a positive way to deal with grief. Running helped me process the pain. But then, as good things often do, it became something negative.

I also realized something else—it made me smaller.

For whatever reason, that made me feel better about myself. So for many years, I learned that if I ran enough and ate little enough, I could stay small. I remember being told in my early twenties that my body fat was too low. At the time, I wore that like a badge of honor. Looking back now, it seems a little ridiculous.

Life, of course, has a way of changing things. After four pregnancies, the number on the scale became harder to control. Each time my weight crept up, I would return to running to try to bring the number back down. After each pregnancy it became harder.

Even when I added strength training, it wasn’t about building strength. It was about burning more calories. Everything revolved around pleasing the number on the scale. If I had to do jumping jacks in between every exercise to burn more calories, I did it. I never considered if I was getting stronger. To be honest, it didn’t matter.

Then something unexpected happened.

After a fall from my horse injured my ankle—and my pride—I wasn’t able to run the way I used to. Instead, I started strength training from a different place. I wasn’t training to burn calories. I was training to be strong. If I couldn’t run, I still needed to be able to move well.

I wanted to lift things. Move things. Feel capable in my body.

And then something strange started happening. People began telling me I looked like I had lost weight.

But when I stepped on the scale, the number hadn’t gone down. In fact, it had gone up.

I remember thinking, “That’s odd… my scale says this, but my old jeans fit again.”

Slowly, it dawned on me.

Maybe the scale wasn’t telling the whole story.

For years I believed the scale told the truth about my health. What I eventually realized is that it was only telling me how much gravity was pulling on my body that morning. It couldn’t measure strength. It couldn’t measure muscle. It couldn’t measure how capable my body had become.

As a nurse practitioner, I do still weigh patients in my clinical practice. Weight trends can matter in certain situations, and sometimes it helps guide medical decisions. It can impact your health, and my job is to make you healthier.

But that number was never meant to determine whether someone should have a good day.

It doesn’t measure resilience.

It doesn’t measure energy.

It doesn’t measure confidence or strength.

What frustrates me most is realizing that the same narrative I grew up with is still alive and well. I see it in my adolescent patients. I see it in the media my children are exposed to.

Boys are often encouraged to become stronger and more capable. A higher number on the scale is even to be celebrated if it means they are building muscle.

Girls often hear a different message. Smaller is better. I work daily to change that narrative. I want my daughters and all girls to know that stronger is better.

I try to remind them of something I wish I had understood earlier: our bodies are meant to be strong, healthy, and capable. Strength is something we build, not something we shrink ourselves into.

I remember when that little bathroom scale could determine what kind of day I was going to have. The number could jump up five pounds overnight from hormones or water retention, even if I had done everything “right” the day before.

Now I see it differently.

If I’m going to focus on a number, I’d rather focus on the amount of weight I can lift.

The number on my deadlift. The number on my squat. The number on my bench press.

Those numbers tell a much more meaningful story. They represent effort, consistency, and progress that actually reflect the work being done.

And maybe the day we stop letting the scale decide our worth is the day we finally start appreciating what our bodies are truly capable of. I think it’s time.

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