As a dietitian, I was trained in school that every person that works with me needs to be weighed. Then, you need to calculate their BMI (or body mass index). Sometimes, the person would be weighed in a public space, and I would read out their weight, double checking that it was accurate. This was a long time ago, yet I still feel such discomfort thinking my approach back then. I realize how my actions must have made that person feel. Whether or not they struggled with their weight, the fact that I was drawing attention to it in this way was not okay. I feel sorry about this. I now know the damage this may have caused for some, and I also know the BMI is pretty well an inadequate indicator of nutrition. It does not represent many body types, merely because it was based on data from a group of middle aged men in the mid-twentieth century who wanted to qualify for life insurance (Metropolitan Life Insurance Tables were created with BMI categories to determine how much of a premium someone would pay based on their weight to height ratio).

Today, when I speak to clients, I try to take a much more compassionate approach: do they want to talk about their weight? If so, I explore why it matters to them. I don’t ask them to weigh themselves between visits, or base their success on what the scale shows. Instead, I explore what experiences they are drawing from when they make their body weight a priority.

Usually, the underlying reason behind weight preoccupation is not related to food at all, rather to something deeper. When we explore this, we realize that perhaps it was the act of regular weighing and the relationship with the scale that just needs to go away for a while. We need to be free of what weights us down.

When we take weight out of our story, we can actually start to pay attention to things that matter when we change how we eat: we can measure success by how our sleep is improving, that we have more energy to do things, that we feel less tired, depressed, or sluggish, and so on. Nutrition is so much more than the weight on the scale, and therefore, I have said “bye” to mine. Will you say “bye” to yours?