Victoria S. Dorsano, a certified health coach, explains why she threw out her bathroom scale. Scales can't tell muscle from fat and don't measure health, she says. She uses body measurements, InBody scans, and how her clothes fit instead.
Hey everyone, my name is Victoria S. Dorsano. If you don't know who I am, I am a certified health coach with an evidence-based approach. And today I am ranting on scales and why I don't own one. I'm going to try to keep this brief, but I get kind of heated when I talk about this. Scales are a terrible metric of overall health and well-being. They really don't give us much data. And for somebody like myself who was born in a— I'm going to say a denser body build, I was born as this little muscly kind of dense, heavy being, which is totally fine. That's just how my body was. I was just really strong and dense. I was always perceived as being overweight, even from a young age, just the way I grew and the way my bones are built and the way my muscle structure is. Going to the doctor's office, I would always be quote unquote overweight, which is goofy because maybe I had some baby fat to lose back then, But now in my current body, if I go to the doctor's office, I'm still on that higher end of what the range should be, you know, should be for, you know, my height and my age. And I find that so silly. It's a very antiquated way of understanding health. It's not taking into account like your muscle mass, your bone tissue, how big your organs are. One person's heart can be a little bit bigger than somebody else's. One person's lungs can be a little bit bigger than somebody else's. It can totally vary depending on the person, the genetics, and all of that. And all of those things in your body have weight to them, but it doesn't necessarily mean that that weight is bad if you're higher or lower or whatever it might be. It's just a very broad indicator, and there's so many better ways to measure your health. So with anybody that I'm working with in my health coaching practice, I actually really don't like to use weight as a metric. You can use body measurements if you'd want to take body measurements with a with a measuring tape. You can use something called an InBody scan that's gonna look at your actual muscle density and your body fat mass and actually take into account like the weight of your organs and the things that aren't necessarily fat or muscle in your body. And that's a much better look. And water too. We can fluctuate so much in weight between, you know, one day to the next by just how much water we're holding. You know, that can even vary 10 pounds at times. If you've ever gotten onto a scale one morning and it's been one measurement and the next day it's 8 pounds more and you're like, what gives? It's water weight. So the scale can be something that's, that's really plays with your mind a lot and it does more harm than good. It can put us into the state of anxiety. So I hate the scale. I don't own a scale and personally it doesn't do me any good. I can also just tell by how my body is feeling, how I'm feeling in my body, in my clothes, if I'm on a heavier side or a lighter side or whatever that looks like for me. So I can pretty much have all that information there for me. The other reason, on a more personal note, why I don't own a scale is because I've had issues with disordered eating in my past, which has kind of led me on this journey becoming a health coach now. But, uh, you know, I used to have a really bad relationship with the scale and really idolized it and saw it as something that would truly dictate how my day was going to go. In a sense, if I was down a few pounds, I would feel like I could conquer the world, and if I was up a few pounds, I felt like a worthless piece of you know what. So I didn't like that it had that much control over my life, and ultimately it wasn't a good indicator of my overall health anyways. So I decided once I got to college, I don't want to look at this. This is making me go crazy. I'm paying way too much attention to this, and I'm focusing on my weight, and it's making me feel terrible if I've gone up in, in weight, which it shouldn't anyways, because I could have been gaining muscle, I could have been gaining water weight. and a higher body weight in general doesn't necessarily correlate to being bad all the time anyway. So the whole thinking around what the scale— like, the, the mindset that the scale was giving me was unhealthy and something I didn't want anymore. And I looked at how there could be other ways that I could really measure my health. And ultimately, when we tune into our bodies, we can sense those things, right? We can sense how we're feeling in our clothes. We can sense how we're moving and feeling if our body's feeling heavier or lighter, and we can adjust according to that. But the scale just wasn't helpful for me and really wasn't giving me much to go off of at all. And there's so many other things that you can use that are way more, uh, in tune of indicators of your health status and your actual fat loss, if that's a goal of yours, like doing the InBody scan or like doing those handheld measurement devices at the gyms that will also show you your body fat percentage. So So that's why myself as a health coach, why I don't own a scale, never plan to, and if you work with me, I'll probably recommend that you throw out yours. So sorry in advance. But before you go, please take a minute and like this video and subscribe to my channel so I can keep providing awesome content like this to you guys. And in the comments, I would love to hear what you thought. What do you guys use as metrics to understand how your body's doing? Do you use the measurement method? Do you use the You know, how you feel in your clothes method. What are some of the things that you guys like to use aside from the scale? So drop that comment down below. I'm excited to read those. And until next time.
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