We all have those things in our life that slowly turn into obsessions. You know, the little daily routines that we do even though we know we might benefit from taking a break.
Maybe you trim your nails a little too close or take an extra critical look at yourself in the mirror.
As we get older, these things don’t always make us feel good, but we do them anyway, if only because we have always done them. I am here to tell you that you can slay the beast.
I have not weighed myself in about two weeks as I write this.
That might not sound like a big deal, but you have to know what the scale means to someone who has spent their life around wrestling. I barely remember a time where I didn’t see controlling weight as an important role in someone’s life.
Thankfully, I didn’t have to really worry about it myself until my second year in high school, but I watched my brother’s friends or my own teammates live and die by the numbers on the scale. Or the balance on one of those old-timey ones.
The numbers became shorthand for self-preservation. “Where are you?” was the common question, second to “How much are you over?”
This wasn’t about self-worth so much, but about making weight. I don’t think we judged one another one how much we weighed or how we looked – in fact, looking bad while still managing to compete pretty much became a badge of honor. We worried about hitting that magic number just long enough to make weight.
Like all wrestlers, I have the stories. The eight pounds in seven hours at Mount Union College. Sneaking into the pool at my high school to make weight against McDonogh while the rest of the school huddled around TV’s to find out what went wrong with the space shuttle Challenger. Stunning new friends at college with how much I could eat in a short time.
I have left those days in the past, and the sport in general has a much healthier attitude to weight management than when I grew up. But the scale still follows me around even though it sits all by itself in the corner of the bathroom.
You have no idea how hard it has been to not step on it the past few weeks just to check. Before I tried this little experiment, I would check at least once a day, sometimes two or three even though I had no weigh-in approaching.
And I didn’t like the number I saw. In fact,. I haven’t liked it for a long, long time. As I started my new workout regiment, I noticed that the number didn’t drop drastically right away.
That’s when I decided to stop checking. I figured if I could make it to the end of May, I could just focus on making strides in other areas instead of walking around with that number in my head all day.
In short, I may have grown up a little in the past few weeks. I just hope when I get back on that scale, I haven’t grown out any more.
Now if I could just learn not to stay up late on weekends when I have actual adult responsibilities the next morning.