Do scales really tell the tale?

Sam McManis
The Sacramento Bee

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Picture, if you will, this sepia-toned snapshot of late-19th-century family life from the diary of a Bostonian:

" ... The Learneds and the Hursts came to Thanksgiving. What a fat turkey we did have, and such a nice lot of things to eat! I asked papa to bring up the weighing scales from the shop so we might be weighed before and after dinner to see how much we would gain by eating such a large dinner."

That 1890 scrivener, one Katherine Fiske Berry, detailed with glee how each dinner guest gained at least 2 pounds (!) during the feast, but she suspected her father of cheating because "he had a lot of things in his pocket to fool us."

Local residents talk on weighty matters

Ah, what a different time it was back in the salad days of America, when we were not required to become slim by eating salad. A time when it was hip to have hips, when a weight scale served as a fun post-repast parlor game, not a stark rebuke to a gluttonous lifestyle.

"It's true that weight was kind of a novelty back then," says Deborah Levine, a postdoctorate fellow in humanities and social sciences at Washington University in St. Louis. She has researched extensively the history of scales.

"It wasn't until the 1920s when your weight became not some kooky thing to know but an important piece of personal health knowledge."

Not surprisingly, Levine adds, that's when the scale was widely moved from the living room to the privacy of the bathroom.

Today, Americans seem to have a dysfunctional relationship with the weight scale. It is evident even as consumers plunk down major coin to purchase technological marvels that can gauge body-fat percentages by sending electric current through your legs, even as medical technology has allowed physicians to use everything from submerging the body in water to computer imaging to determine types of fat and where it resides.

Alternative measurements ranging from the low-tech (body mass index, waist circumference, waist-to-hips ratio) to the high-tech (skin-fold, hydrostatic,

MRI and CT scans, and the space-age Bod Pod) theoretically could render old-school scales as obsolete as, well, parlors.

So, if we're so obsessed with weight control, why is it that some doctors are reporting that people refuse to be weighed during office visits -- or turn their backs, put their fingers in their ears and ask not to know the tale of the scale?

Dialing up emotions

On the other hand, why are others so obsessed with their daily poundage fluctuation that they weigh themselves four times a day?

"We tend to impose judgments on ourselves and others based on what the scale says," says Dr. Michael Okimura, an endocrinologist who is director of the medical weight-management program at Kaiser Permanente Medical Center, Sacramento. "The scale is just one tool and not what you should focus on. It's not always an accurate determination as to your health."

Registered dietitian Nancy Clark, who says the scale in her office is dusty from disuse, discourages vigilant weighing. Instead, she always asks her clients, "How do your clothes fit?"

Counterintuitive as it may sound, Clark sees the emphasis on quantifying weight as detrimental to achieving weight-loss goals, not to mention its negative effect on one's emotions.

"People trying to lose weight may wake up, weigh themselves and see they've actually gained weight and they cry, 'I've been dieting and dieting, and the scale goes up?' They don't realize the focus should be on health and how you feel. They might give up because they don't realize all the factors involved in determining weight."