Weight Neutrality

Being weight neutral (not focusing obsessively on your weight) is a great way to improve your body image and therefore your happiness and enjoyment in life. Here are some reasons why you should become weight neutral and focus less on the scale and more on how you feel!

1. Most people pick a weight and then try to reach and maintain it but this usually doesn't work. Follow-up studies of 2-5 years show almost everyone regains at least the weight they lost if not more, regardless of treatment. Therefore, it is not a good idea to focus on the numbers on the scale when deciding to get healthy.

2. Weight loss promoters promise a better life. But trying to reach a specific number on the scale leaves you vulnerable to hazardous weight practices. It makes you pay attention to the wrong thing: While your eye is on the scale, your hair could be falling out, your friendships straining, your concentration shot. This is the process to reach a "healthy" weight? Why not go for the better life by working directly on the things that matter to you and let your weight do whatever it does?

3. If you are not "weight neutral," you might be perpetuating the myth that you can "read" a person's character from the size of her body. This is a form of prejudice in which we are all well-schooled. You might be perpetuating this myth on yourself as well, associating "good" traits with thinness and the "bad" ones with fatness. In fact, all of us are capable of a whole range of behaviors regardless of our sizes.

4. Weight neutrality frees up all the money you spend on attempts to change weight. Go ahead and add it up: How much have you spent on diets, diet products, multiple wardrobes in different sizes, clothes that you've never worn, hardly used gym memberships, and so on?

5. Weight neutrality frees up all the time and energy you spend on attempts to change weight. Think about all the obsessing about weight (for yourself and others) and think how you could harness it for what really matters.

6. Being weight neutral allows you to "keep your eyes on the prize": Developing the skills you need to be resilient and flexible in the face of life's demands and opportunities. How effective a person are you allowing yourself to be if retaining water ruins your day? How satisfying can such a day be to you?

7. It makes you feel free, free, free! Free of the industries which want your money that promise to cure your insecurities that don't really want to offer a product that works because then you wouldn't keep coming back to spend more money to cure your insecurities. . . you get the picture.

8. It allows you to appreciate the wonders of this body you occupy.

9. It allows you to appreciate the wonders of other people whose bodies are not "perfect."

10. It's more fun. Free your body and your mind will follow .