When it's more than a habit

This book is about a habit, and a habit is something you can decide about. Some readers will recognise, in reading it, that the scale is part of something they can't decide their way out of, and this chapter is for them.

The NHS lists, among the signs of an eating disorder, spending a lot of time worrying about your weight and body shape, eating very little, making yourself sick or taking laxatives after eating, exercising too much, having very strict habits or routines around food, and changes in mood such as being withdrawn, anxious or depressed. If the number on the scale decides whether you eat that day, or how much, or what you must do afterwards, and if that's most days, then the scale isn't a habit in the sense this book means. It's part of a condition that has treatment. The NHS says to see a GP as soon as you can, and that with treatment most people recover. The charity Beat has a helpline and a website, and the NHS page links to both. Nothing in chapters 17 to 21 is a substitute for that, and I'd rather you closed the book here and rang someone than took the break as a cure.

The same goes in the other direction. If you've felt low most of the day, most days, for a fortnight or more, with the loss of interest and energy the NHS describes on its page about depression in adults, the scale may be one of the few things producing a reaction, and that isn't a reason to keep it. It's a reason to see a GP, and to let the mornings wait until you have.

Then there's the reader who's been asked to weigh daily by someone who knows why. The British Heart Foundation's page on heart failure says to weigh yourself regularly because a sudden gain can mean fluid building up that needs treating, and the NHS lists sudden weight gain among the signs to get urgent help for. In that case the daily number is exactly what this book says it usually isn't. It's a signal, read by someone trained to read it, and water is the point. Keep doing what you've been asked. The same applies in pregnancy and in any condition where a clinician has asked for a daily figure. If the number is still setting your mood, that's worth telling them, because they can help with how to read it. But the weighing continues.

And the reader who's begun to suspect that the scale is one of several things they check, count or recheck, and that the checking spreads. You've checked already, in this series, is about that habit and about where it shades into something a GP should hear about.

None of this is a diagnosis. It's the line where a book stops being the right tool, and I'd rather draw it clearly than pretend it isn't there.