How to Measure Success Beyond the Scale

If the number on the scale has been your primary way of knowing whether things are going well with food, this episode is for you. A conversation with a new client, who is literally a scientist, sparked something I knew I had to bring to the podcast.

You can be making real progress, feeling calmer around food, binging less, feeling more connected, and still find yourself on the scale waiting for the number to confirm what you're already experiencing. And when it doesn't? All that real progress disappears.

In this episode, I talk about why the scale is measuring the wrong thing entirely, what it actually means to track success in your relationship with food, and what I've seen in my own experience when a number became the thing I was chasing.

What You'll Discover:

• Why chasing a number keeps you in monitoring mode rather than in connection with yourself
• What the scale can't measure and why that data matters more than the number
• My own experience with using the scale as a measure of control, and what I can see now that I couldn't then
• What to do with the scale if you're not ready to put it away entirely

If you've ever felt like you were making progress, only to have the scale talk you out of it, this episode will give you a different way to measure what's actually happening.

If you want to know what it would look like to explore this with support, schedule a Breakthrough Call today.

Want to know why you struggle with food and what to do next? Start watching The Food Freedom Mini Series today. 

Transcript

Copy Transcript Copied

SPEAKER_00 0:00

If the scale has been your primary way of knowing whether things are going well with food, you are not alone. Today, we're going to talk about what it looks like to measure success beyond the scale and what you might be missing when a number is the only data point that counts. Welcome to Binge Eating Breakthrough, the podcast to help you stop feeling out of control around food and build trust with your body. If you've tried everything but still feel stuck, you're not alone. I've been there too. I'm Jane Pilger, and I'm here to help you see binge eating in a new way so you can finally break free. Each week you'll give the tools and insights to create peace with food and your body. Your breakthrough starts now. Hello, trusted listener. I consider you a trusted listener because I trust that you're willing to question some of the things you've always been told are the right way to measure whether or not something is working. I trust that even if today's topic brings up some discomfort, you're here because part of you already suspects there might be a better way. And I trust that you're genuinely curious about what success with food could look like when you stop outsourcing that answer to a number. So I want to start today with a conversation that I recently had with a new client. And after we talked, I kept thinking about our conversation. And I realized that I wanted to bring it here because it's something that I hear in some version from so many people that I work with. So this client is a scientist, like an actual scientist. So when I talk about being a scientist with your own experience, your experiences with food, getting curious, collecting data, noticing what's happening without jumping to conclusions, she was like, Yes, that is exactly how I think. I love data. I'm used to monitoring data. I'm used to tracking what's happening so I can understand the results. So she's been going through the program and she's noticing real changes. She's feeling more calm around food, more connected with herself. She's having fewer binges. Things are genuinely shifting in her relationship with food. But yet she keeps finding herself on the scale, waiting for the number to confirm what she's already experiencing. And then when the number hasn't moved in the way that she expects, she starts wondering if she's doing it right, whether she needs to eat less, whether the progress she's been feeling is real. It's like, well, it has to show up on the scale in order for it to be real. But here's what's fascinating. She already has the data. She's living it. The calm, it's real. The connection, it's real. The reduction in binges is real. But without the number agreeing or validating her experience, she can't fully trust yet what her own body is telling her. And that's what I'm going to talk about today. The scale, if the scale is the only data point, we have a problem. And for so many people who come to me, the scale has been the primary way that they have measured their relationship with food for most of their lives. Myself included. The number goes up, something has gone wrong. You are either succeeding or failing. And the scale is the judge. And it makes sense. It feels objective. It's concrete. It is data. It gives you something to point to. And in a world where food and eating can feel chaotic and confusing, having one clear metric feels like solid ground. But here's what I told my client and what I want to offer to you today. If you are constantly chasing a number, you will have to keep monitoring yourself. You will have to keep tracking, adjusting, evaluating yourself against an external standard. And that process, that constant checking, that orienting toward a number instead of toward yourself is part of what keeps you disconnected from the very signals that you are trying to rebuild trust with. So she mentioned wanting to find her natural weight. And she has a sense of what that might be. And she was hoping that by eating more freely, she would eventually land there. And I think it's a beautiful instinct. But I also told her that trying to manipulate what you eat in order to arrive at a specific number won't allow you to find your natural weight. Your natural weight is what happens when you're eating in response to your body's actual signals, not in response to a goal. The moment you're steering toward a number, you are no longer in that experience, experiment. You are back in management mode. If you are looking at the scale and you're trying to decide, can I eat more? Should I eat less based on the number? That's management. That is control. That is manipulation. So let's talk about what the scale measures and what the scale doesn't measure. The scale measures one thing: your gravitational pull toward the earth. That's it. It doesn't measure how many times this week you sat down to eat without your heart racing. It doesn't measure the moment you noticed you actually felt pretty satisfied and you paused. It doesn't measure the afternoon that you felt stressed and you reached for something to eat and then got curious about what was going on instead of just eating through it. It doesn't measure the fact that you went to a dinner with friends and didn't spend the whole time calculating or compensating. It doesn't measure the fact that on your way home from dinner that night, you didn't stop to get more food or eat more when you got home, that you just went straight to bed. It doesn't measure the quiet, the absence of food noise, the experience of just eating something and moving on. Those things are not small. Those items are the actual work. And when the scale becomes the only or primary indicator of success, all of that, all of that real, lived, felt progress gets dismissed because the number didn't move. That is not a measurement problem. It's a definition problem. We've defined success so narrowly that we can't see what's actually happening. And it makes sense because it's what we've done for years. It's what our bodies and our nervous systems have known. So I want to share a little bit about my own experience with this. So there was a period in my life when I was in pretty extreme restriction. I got to my lowest weight, and the scale became something I was very focused on. I had been focused on the scale, I would say, probably since my junior, senior year of high school. But at this point, when I was in this extreme restriction, I was even more focused on the scale. I kept wanting to see that number go down. And every time it did, there was this feeling of power, of control. It was like I was winning at something. And I kept wanting it to go lower. And I can look back now and see so clearly that I was at an unhealthy weight. But in the middle of it, I could not see it. I thought I looked amazing. I was getting compliments, and that felt like confirmation that I was doing something right. There were also plenty of people who told me I was getting too small or that it wasn't healthy. And honestly, I didn't want to hear it. What I know now that I didn't know then is what felt like control was actually a very fragile kind. It was almost like false safety. The scale was telling me that I was okay. But my body was not. Now, if we fast forward to what I do today, I do weigh myself on occasion. But here's what I notice. Anytime I look at the number and I think that I need to change it, that it's too high, that it's not good enough or whatever judgment or thought I have about it, I notice an immediate increase in thoughts about food. Almost immediately. And this is something I see with so many clients. Just the thought of needing to lose weight can trigger more food preoccupation, not less. And for anyone with a history of dieting or disordered eating, the thought of restriction, even just the idea of it, can activate the body's survival response. It anticipates what might be coming. And the result is often more urges, more food noise, and often binges. The body is trying to stock up before the upcoming drought arrives. And the scale doesn't know any of that is happening. It just shows you a number. And what I found on the other side of all of this is something that I could not have predicted when I was deep in the cycle. My body has settled into a weight that feels natural, a place it wants to be. It goes up and down a little the way that bodies do. But what I've noticed is that it mostly only drifts up when I start thinking it should be lower. The moment I'm in my head about the number, my body responds. But when I'm in a peaceful relationship with food, not perfect, not effortless, but present and conscious, my body finds its own equilibrium. It doesn't require constant monitoring to stay there. It requires me paying attention to myself, not the scale. So you might be wondering, as you're listening, you might be wondering, well, what do I do with the scale? Do I weigh myself? Do I not weigh myself? And I want to be really honest because I don't think that a blanket rule serves everyone equally. My general recommendation is to stay off the scale entirely, especially in this early process, because for most people, the number has too much charge attached to it. It is not neutral data. It is often looked at as a verdict. Good, bad, right, wrong. But I also know that people are individual. Everybody's situation is going to be individual. The client I was talking to was weighing herself regularly, sometimes multiple times a day. And so for her, what I suggested wasn't to just throw the scale out, that might not feel safe, but to bring some structure to it if she wanted to keep it. So what I suggested to her was to weigh once a week on the same day at the same time. And that way you're not chasing moment-to-moment fluctuations, which are mostly just water, food volume, and normal rhythms of your body. You're getting a less reactive picture. And the thing that was pretty interesting is as we were talking about it, she's like, you know, I actually know. Like my inner knowing knows that once a week is really a good answer for me. But I have the, you know, the voice. Like, ooh, let's see if it's working. What about now? What do I what do I weigh now? Really kind of thinking about that. But if we decide ahead of time, this is the day that we weigh. Any other time that the the desire, the temptation to get on the scale comes, no, we only weigh on Friday mornings at this time or as soon as we wake up, whatever it is. We just know that is the decision. Other than that, we just don't do it. And if soon as you do that more regularly, you will lose the desire to keep getting on the scale all of the time. But there will be a time, if you are somebody who weighs yourself on a regular basis, you really will be tempted, especially if you are trying to use that number and that weight as a judge of if you are doing it right or not. But even the discussion of weighing yourself once a week, or I've had clients also weigh once a month. And to be clear, my general recommendation is to not weigh yourself at all. But even weighing yourself, the decision to weigh yourself, number one, decide if you are going to and when you will. But even that comes with a caveat. What are you going to do with the number when you see it? If the number going up means that you're going to eat less, we actually haven't changed anything. We've just changed the frequency of the loop. So the more useful question isn't what does the scale say? It's this. The question is that we really want to ask is how am I feeling in my relationship with food right now? Am I calmer? Am I more connected? Is there less noise? Do I feel more like myself around food than I did six months ago? Those are the questions that tell you whether something is actually working. So the destination that I work toward with every client is what I would describe as a felt sense of calm, ease, and confidence around food. The absence or the minimization of noise. Being able to eat something and move on. Not spending the first hour of every morning thinking about what you're gonna eat and whether you're gonna be able to stick to it today. Not ending every day in a review of how you did. That kind of freedom is internal. It lives in your body and in your nervous system, not on a scale. And the only way to know if you're moving toward it is to start paying attention to the signals that actually measure it. And this client, the scientist, she's already collecting that data. She's just learned over time to discount it if the scale doesn't agree. And that's what I want you to invite. It's what I want to invite you to reconsider today. That felt sense of peace and ease around food is real data. And it might be the most important data that you have. Now, this doesn't mean that you have a felt sense of peace and ease and calm around food, and then we just don't think about our body or how it feels. That is not it at all. But we can't only look at the external. We can't just look at what is the number on the scale saying. We want to know about the internal sense. And the more you get to that internal sense of peace and ease with food, that's where the long-term change happens. And your body may, depending on what it's been through, we have no idea person to person what will happen with a body. But here's what I know for sure: when you aren't monitoring and trying to control and trying to manipulate what you are or aren't eating because of the number on the scale, you are much more likely to be able to get into partnership with your body to find a natural weight for you. But it takes this communication, this two-way trust with your body, not just focusing on a very specific number. Now, you might also be thinking, but what about my health? What if I actually need to address my weight for medical reasons? Now, this is a real question, and I know it is one that many people have. And for this reason, I'm going to devote all of next week's episode to this question because it deserves its own space. So if you are sitting with this tension right now of wait, I need to lose weight for my health, stay with me and please tune in next week. But for today, I want to leave you with this. You are not failing because the scale hasn't moved. You might actually be succeeding in ways that the scale was never designed to measure. So start noticing those. Write them down if it helps. Pay attention to the moments of calm, the absence of urgency, the times you eat something and feel okay about it. Those can become data points. Your body is always communicating with you. And when you stop looking at the scale for the answer, you start to be able to hear what your body actually has to say. That's what I have for you today. I'll see you next week. If you like what you're hearing on the podcast, you will love my new book: The Binge Eating Breakthrough. Why food isn't the problem and what really is. Discover why willpower isn't the answer. My restricting certain foods often have flavors, and my understanding of brain and body is the key to lasting change.com forward slash.