The One Thing You Need To Do To Feel Better About Your Body That Doesn't Involve Your Body At All

The internet is full of articles, lists, and memes, telling you how to feel better about your body ASAP! Many of them are helpful, but when read as a whole, they can become really overwhelming. They might even begin to seem totally contradictory. But it doesn’t have to be that complicated. If you want to feel better about your body, there’s really only one thing you need to do to start, and it requires very little (physical) effort on your part.

And although the real answer is that there’s not actually a right answer here because everyone is different, and what makes one person feel better might actually make another person feel worse, there actually is a right answer, too: The one thing you need to do to feel better about your body is throw your scale out and never look back because scales are the devil.

Think about it. A scale is merely a way to measure a number that may be important for medical reasons, but not for self-esteem. That number will never indicate you happiness. A scale will never be able to tell you your worth or tell you whether you are beautiful (Spoiler Alert: You Are.) A scale can't weight your strength, success, and satisfaction. It can't let you know how many important people you have in your life, and what those people love most about you. It's just a piece of machinery that's taking up space in your bathroom.

Yes, throwing out your scale will not fix your body image right away. But getting rid of it is a step towards loving yourself and committing yourself to that process. Last year, The Militant Baker started a Smash the Scale Revolution, and said that ridding yourself of your scale was “about deciding what your definition of beauty is and knowing that it is enough.”

Letting go of your scale means letting go of the conventional beauty standards that can become your prison. It means freeing yourself from the unattainable number that has dictated your worth. It means moving towards focusing on the things you love about yourself instead of spending your time obsessing over a digital representation of who you are.

By getting rid of your scale, you free yourself to find other ways to measure your worth. You can measure your worth by how good you are at playing chess, how much fun you have cooking for your friends, or how much your cat loves cuddling with you when you get home from work. I like to measure my worth by how happy my bright red hair makes me when I wake up in the morning and how large the smile on my daughter’s face is when I pick her up at the end of the day.

Because your weight does not dictate anything about you. It is simply a number, and an empty one, at that.

So if you want to feel better about your body, tossing your scale is a really great place to start.

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