This post originally appeared on Bustle.
By Amy McCarthy
I’ve been dieting on and off since I was a kid. I’ve tried prescription diet pills from shady doctors and every kind of fad diet imaginable, and about a year ago, I just quit. I stopped (for the most part) counting calories or dieting or anything that remotely resembled restricting the food that I ate. It was bliss. It was the first major step I’d taken in accepting my body.
Since then, I’ve really never been happier. Occasionally, though, I would catch myself stealing glances at one of the omnipresent diet ads in ladymags, or lingering down the diet pills aisle at the supermarket, trying to talk myself out of buying the latest batch of snake oil. More frequently, I was still using the most common household torture device for the modern woman: the scale.
LadyRomp 
Every day. When I quit, I gained 30 pounds, and looked and felt miserable. The daily scale keeps me balanced. Sorry to disagree.
That is fine!!! Whatever works for you is good. Everyone is different. Thank you for your comments.
I wish I could throw it away. It can be misleading. If I eat sweets, and don’t gain weight right away, I think I can get away with it. Then when I don’t lose right away, I’m bummed. So it definitely has its drawbacks! 🙂
I know, I feel like that too!! I have to be very careful and I count calories all day and son tells me I don’t enough.
🙂 The point is we need to be healthy, however that happens. 🙂
I haven’t ever had a scale. That’s not to say that I don’t diet in the sense that I guide myself by a good, basic commonsense diet that works, on an ongoing basis (no fads but lots of personal honesty!), but can’t we tell whether we like how we look and feel using a mirror and seeing whether the clothes still fit the way we like?
However, each to their own. I am tall and I just don’t like the big numbers on the scale that come with that. I’d rather just look and see if I like the reflection in the mirror! If not, time to get serious for a couple of months.
I love that!! You are giving me some food for thought! Thank you.