A Tale Of Three Scales

The scale upon which I have been weighing myself these last four years (and these last 43 — and counting — days) has been an off-the-shelf, 9-volt-battery-powered digital model purchased from Rite-Aid… or maybe back then it was still Sav-on.

Wherever it was acquired I’ve never really cared whether it was ultra-accurate, just that it was within a pound or two of whatever my ever-fluctuating specific weight was at the time.

Lurking in the shadows of the spare bathroom is another digital scale that I haven’t utilized this time around, in part because in 2006 during the course of my six-month 52-pound drop from 260 to 208, on the one or two occasions I stepped on it, its measurement varied from mine by as much as five pounds… in the wrong direction — and that was not only a blow to the momentum, but also a seed of doubt planted. “What if that scale’s right and mine’s wrong?”

Sturdier dieters than me would discard the more forgiving scale and start using the less forgiving one, but I clung to the scale I’d been using, of course not without always wondering what the other one might read.

Well, about a week ago I finally manned up and ventured into the spare bathroom, where I hauled out that long-bothersome sucker for a comparison. Sure enough, my scale read 228. That scale read 231.

So I said to hell with both of ’em and their discrepancies and went research on their varying asses. Googled up “most accurate scale” in my web browser and bless them, I found Consumer Reports had done a test to find the best one out there and the result was the Taylor No. 7506.

I told Amazon to ship me one and it arrived this morning.

Stepping to it I was ready to accept whatever it calculated my weight to be. But first I took to my go-to old scale, which read read 226, and then the possessed one in the spare bathroom, which listed me at 232. The respective bipolar bastards dared deliver a six-pound spread.

Then came the new scale’s verdict: 227.6 (its 10ths of a pound are new and a nice touch).

So while it would be nice to list 226 as my weight today, I’m sucking it up and recalibrating to 227.6. Maybe that extra 1.6 pounds is the confidence I have of it being a more realistic assessor.