Every morning, before I go downstairs, I step on a scale. My goal is to see as low a number as possible, so I take no chances. I do not wear clothes when I weigh myself. I use the toilet beforehand but do not drink any water. Sometimes I even suck in my gut while standing on the scale, as if rearranging my torso to look more superficially flattering will somehow change the number glowing back at me. I have an ideal weight in mind for myself: 210. The scale rarely, if ever, hits this magic number. When it goes higher, particularly if it nears 220, my brain instinctively conducts a mental inventory of the previous day’s eating, looking for the primary culprit. It was the cookies. You had too many cookies. Today you will not eat cookies.

And then I begin my day with the appropriate amount of shame.

This routine constitutes progress for me. I am healthy for my age (47), although I didn’t arrive at this point without a struggle. I was an overweight child who never weighed myself because I knew what I’d have to confront if I did. The word husky still triggers me. I still have stretch marks on my sides from my love handles breaking contain. I still have breast tissue. I went to a weight-loss program in middle school that accomplished nothing except making me feel like I was at fat camp. I topped the dreaded scale at 280 in college, then dropped back down to 200, then gained 60 of it back more than a decade later, and then dropped the weight again. I have tried fad diets, exercise, posting my weight daily on social media, calorie counting, intermittent fasting, you name it. Some of those weight-loss schemes worked, others did not.

In the end, always in the end, the scale served as the final arbiter of how much that month’s scheme had succeeded. How much I had succeeded. I needed that scale. I fucking hated that scale, and still do.