The weigh day — The scale is a poor judge

Pick the morning. It wants to be one that's usually ordinary. Not Monday, because of Orsama's weekend rise, and not the morning after your usual big night. For most people something like Wednesday or Thursday works, and once it's picked it doesn't move. If you miss it, you don't weigh on Friday instead. You wait until next week. A reading on a different day isn't comparable and it's also the daily habit sneaking back in through a side door.

Same conditions each time, chapter 16. After the loo, before the kettle, same clothes or none, same scale on the same tiles. Step on once, read it, write it in the notebook that lives next to the scale, and step off. That's the weigh day. It's over in the same minute it always took.

Then the harder part. The number will still try to swing you, because you've spent years training it to. The first few weigh days, expect the same reaction you'd have had on any morning, and expect it to feel stronger, because it's been a week. Here's what to do with it. Look at the notebook, not the scale. Under this week's number there's last week's, and the week before. If there are fewer than four, there's no line yet and the number can't be read, and you say that to yourself in so many words. Not enough points. If there are four or more, look at where they're heading, and read that instead of today.

The other six mornings the scale doesn't get stepped on. It can stay on the floor if you can walk past it. If you can't, it goes in the cupboard from Thursday to Wednesday, and comes out for its minute. There's no shame in the cupboard. The cupboard is a tool.

What you're likely to find, and this is expectation rather than finding, is that after a month the weigh day is a fairly dull event. A number, a note, a glance at three others, kettle on. The swing shrinks, not because you've decided not to feel it, chapter 11 said that doesn't work, but because the number has become one of a set, and a set is a much less frightening thing than a point. Some readers find after a couple of months that they forget the weigh day, and I'd treat that as good news rather than a lapse, as long as it's forgetting and not avoiding.

And if a real line appears, four weeks going the same way, you've got what the scale was always for. Something to act on, if you want to act, arrived in good time and without a single false alarm. That's the only version of "keeping an eye on it" that actually keeps an eye on anything.