I have a scale. It mostly gathers dust under the bathroom counter now.
I don’t weigh myself daily or even weekly. On the rare occasion I step onto that little platform it offers up a number that tells me not very much about myself. I can extrapolate more or less whatever I want, that I’m in decent shape for a guy my age, or that I’m finally slipping over a precipice into ruin, or that I haven’t been eating well enough, or that I need to work out more. Any of those things might be partially true, but working forwards or backwards to them from my weight is sort of nonsensical.
As they say in Maine, “You can’t get there from here.”
The scale doesn’t really tell me whether I’m fit or not, and fit is all I want to be. I understand that our culture has, for some decades, prized thinness, and we are all affected by that. Even those of us who consciously reject thinness as a barometer of our worth or quality of our lives, are barraged by messages, both overt and covert, that regardless of what we think, thinner would be better.
If age is just a number (this is sort of true), then weight is the same. I can out ride or out run most people twenty years younger. Equally, I have been outridden by so many “big” people. Age and weight might be crude markers of fitness, but only that.
Focusing on weight, when what you want is to ride bikes, to go out and play and explore the world, is putting the cart before the horse in an entirely unhelpful way. If you are fit, if you focus on getting stronger or increasing your capacity, you will lose weight or you won’t, but you’ll certainly be achieving the things you want for yourself.
Weight is one of those lingering, taboo subjects. We skirt its edges. Fatphobia is real and pervasive and hurts us all.
I normally confine my commentary on weight to bikes themselves. There is nothing about a pound or two of bike weight that is having a meaningful impact on most people’s riding. Fit is more important by a mile-and-a-half. Bike weight is only misleading shorthand for that elusive something that makes a bike great (for you).
But basically, the same thing is true for our bodies. All of them work pretty well when we invest in them. It’s not what the body weighs, but what it’ll do when asked. Will it go? Fitness is not the dominion of the thin. In fact, many thinner people aren’t that fit at all. They’re just thin.
To be clear, there’s nothing wrong with being thin. It’s just not necessary for fitness, and if we’re talking about having fun on a bike or just being a healthy person, fitness will always be more important than the number the scale gives you. I don’t weigh myself very often at all, because it doesn’t give me any information I can’t get more accurately from my bike.
