icon to save an article into your beauty book.
icon to delete a product. 
My friend Sue is naturally thin. She weighs the same now as she did in high school, when she was captain of the cheerleading squad. I hate that. She eats sandwiches with two pieces of bread, adds a couple dozen fried onion rings, and downs it all with Coke Classic. But before you decide you would not wish good things on Sue, let me add: She is a great example of the dilemma we face when we rely on a piece of metal — the scale — to determine our self-worth.
Sue works in a doctor's office, where she occasionally weighs herself. One day she was five pounds lighter than at her previous check-in. She was thrilled. On her lunch break, she admired herself in store windows, then bought a new outfit. She ate extra onion rings and treated herself to a huge slice of chocolate cake. The next day, her boss mentioned that the scale was eight pounds off — in the wrong direction.
Sue was stunned. Far from having lost five pounds since her last weigh-in, she'd actually gained three. And that was before her lunchtime food fest. All at once Sue felt as if her clothes were too tight and she had a muffin-top the size of California spilling over her belt. "I need to go on a diet," she wailed to me on the phone that day. "I can't believe how fat I am."
Sound familiar? You're sailing along in life, feeling pretty good about everything, even your body. No, it isn't perfect, but it is yours and it is doing what it's supposed to do — mowing the lawn, ironing your skirt, playing baseball with the kids. Then you get on the scale. You weigh more than you thought you did, and within a nanosecond, the scary voice in your mind begins to rant: "You're fat, you're a failure, you don't deserve to feel good about anything!" Suddenly everything that was right before you stepped on the scale is wrong.
Most of us have experienced this shocking self-esteem swing, and although we hate it, we don't see any way out. But I do. The solution is to just stop weighing yourself. Throw away your scale.
Now I hear your response:
"Yes, I know that my scale makes me feel bad sometimes. But when I lose weight, I feel good — which helps me keep up my efforts."
I understand that reasoning (it's also a version of the Weight Watchers philosophy, which some people swear by). So instead of insisting that you're wrong, let me tell you about my own experience.
I know all about weighing. I used to get on the scale when I first woke up in the morning, then again after my shower, and then again after exercising. If I was sick and throwing up, I'd weigh myself 10, 20 times a day for the pleasure of seeing the number go down. And on the days that the number went up, I'd cheat. I'd move the dial (way back in the pre-digital last century, you could hand set the starting point of your scale) to negative five pounds. Or 10. Then I'd walk around feeling as if I were as lanky as Julia Roberts, minus the big hair.
So I'm an expert on this weighing disease and I've coined a new name for it: Scale Madness Disorder.
