Flakey scales

Before I start literally talking about other shit, a bit of a preamble is in order. So, lets begin. In a desperate attempt to pull myself out of my recent winter blues and to hopefully avoid going completely pitifully morbidly stark-raving nuts, I embarked upon yet another fitness kick. I figure, if I really force myself to get myself going, then perhaps eventually my heart and mind will follow. I started with a lot of voracious reading, probably a couple thousand pages total on health, fitness, and nutrition. I wanted to do it better than before. It was quite an eye-opener, I pretty much realized how wrong I was on previous attempts in certain ways. It wasn't for lack of information or that I didn't have the knowledge in the first place, it was that there's too much information out there and a lot of it is contradictory. Ok, I also fell victim a little to gimicky type systems on occasion that don't really work except temporarily.

I'd read a lot years ago and thought I had a good idea of what to do but I decided to do another literature survey, found a few ad-less sources that went back to basics and moved on: change of eating habits and consistent exercise and 2 extra philosophical points to get the system going.

• Point 1: Something that probably caused my slippage from my programs before that I realise now is that they relied solely on will-power. I read an interesting article on the subject of will power. It is not a bottomless well. I does run out. It can be used to jump-start, to break the inertia, but it cannot be used to maintain. Maintaining requires something else other than raw will-power because will-power will get exhausted. Will-power is best used to jump one's-self into a new maintainable system, or to create the things that will make it maintainable on its own, but without being used itself. I think if you think about it like I did it makes perfect sense and I don't know why that didn't occur to me.
• Point 2: Sometimes in order to make the odds of success as great as possible one must overwhelm it. That is, one must sometimes do all the little ancillary things that, although strictly speaking may be unnecessary, do facilitate the goal or at least improve the environment towards that goal. Or, a little tangentially speaking, a change in lifestyle often requires a change in environment.

In this particular case, what that looks like is I went a little overboard and started buying things. Workout clothes, heart-rate monitor, exercise ball, books, stopwatch, vitamins, gym membership, fancy scale, etc. Oh and I picked up something a little later that I'll write about soon... but for now I want to talk about the scale.

BATHROOM SCALES PISS ME OFF.

This is the third scale that I've purchased since moving out here. The first was just to have (cheap analog scale). The second was from my last fitness attempt and a little better (cheap, but digital to half-pound). This one is more fancy (hokey body-fat/BMI measuring, digital to 0.2 pounds) in an attempt to look serious. Every one of them, and I'm convinced ALL bathroom scales, do not measure consistently. I'm not talking about different readings when I take multiple measurements, I know weight fluctuates by up to 2 pounds during a day. I'm talking about 3 different measurements taken consecutively, and by up to a pound or more different each time. Try this with yours. Pull out your scale, measure. Now, rotate it on the floor 40 degrees or move it to another room and measure again, then rotate and measure again. I get a different reading every time. Maybe it's my linolium floor's slight surface abnormalities affecting the readings, it doesn't make sense that that should matter, it's still flat. Gaaarrrrgh. My bathroom is quite small and I have to drag my scale out of the corner to take a measurement and the placement matters, I can't just leave it there to take a calibrated reading each time in the same spot.

Those medical balance type scales are supposed to be the most accurate and consistent. Sadly, they're big and expensive and I don't have a place to put it. So my current workaround is to do multiple on-off rotate and measure readings and pick the highest number. I know you're not supposed to take weight too seriously, and I don't, but darnit seeing even a little bit of progress via a measurement is vital motivation and I don't want to get discouraged by a flaky scale. Plus, to do most things right, it's important to have a good means of measuring progress, if nothing else than as feedback and an alert to make a correction. Other forms, like inches on waist, look and feel, how the clothes fit, and such are just waaaay to subtle, difficult to measure, and take a long time to see even a little progress.

So what if it's off by a pound or so, right? Gah! When one has milestones to reach, that pound makes all the difference. It can make or break morale. It can... It can... Bleh, it's not the most imporant thing to have, has little to do with what I eat and how much I move, but I just wish it was bloody consistent.

PS: My philosophical points were best explained from this blog. I find him a borderline new-age nut, but he has some good points.