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Sunday 14 August 2011

those damn scales again


I’ve been pushing my dietician to find out my weight from my gp. I know my gp won’t tell me and I thought I would have a better chance of getting this information out of M, so that’s where I’ve been focusing my efforts. But truthfully I think deep down I didn’t expect her to tell me. So although she didn’t tell me the numbers, I was still very caught off guard on thurs night when she told me the trend of my weight over the last three or four months. Basically it went up slightly originally and has then been stable for the last two months.

Right.

How do I feel about this?

How about, completely confused.

M did spend quite a long time explaining what would have caused the initial weight gain. Firstly all starved people are dehydrated, even if they are drinking. And since 1L of water weighs 1kg, fluid alone will account for quite a large percentage of that initial increase. Then there’s the GI tract. Initially, of course this would have been pretty empty, but now that I am eating again normal changes here will add to the numbers on the scale. And neither of these factors will affect how ‘big’ I am. Just the number on the scale.

Okay. So I’m a scientific thinker. This all sounds reasonable to me, doesn’t it? Well, no. It must be wrong. I have always questioned Dr C’s scales anyway – they are so imprecise. So her scales must be wrong.

But is that me thinking that, or ED?

Like I said completely confused.

It’s not that I don’t trust Dr C or M, or that I think they are lying to me. It’s just that I think they must be mistaken. My weight simply could not be stable.

So I weighed myself.

And to say that I’m more confused now would be a gross understatement. My weight is where they said it was. It hasn’t increased that much. In fact I am okay about it.

But I’m not oblivious to how dangerous that decision was. What if they had been wrong? What if my weight had gone up more than I expected? What would I have done?

Don’t get me wrong – I’m fine. In fact I’m really pretty good. But that in itself concerns me as I think I’ve let those damn scales determine my mood again. Arrgghhh, so confused…

1 comment:

M said...

Amazing, your Dr and dietician have not been lying to you! Who'd have thunk it? :)

Maybe it would have been better to trust them and not have checked yourself, but I'm also a believer in what is done is done. What have you learnt? Two things I can think of straight up are: 1) you can trust your team. 2) eating more and exercising less has not caused your weight to balloon.

So where to from here? Your team recommends not weighing. Given all of the above, why not trust them?

Eventually, it will be great to not care what the number says. But just because you are not yet at that point doesn't take away from the progress you have made and will continue to make.