How the bathroom scale fueled American fat shaming
Intended to inform, it’s now your judgiest roommate
Imagine waking up and not thinking about your thighs. Envision a world where you don’t weigh yourself before showering every morning, and then again after the gym. Consider life where a number on a scale doesn’t dictate your “health.”
There was a time when that number had little effect on a person, if they even thought about weight at all. Then the bathroom scale put shame at consumers’ fingertips.
The Industrial Revolution brought about a proliferation of lower-priced, processed food — choosing fresh food suddenly became optional. Simultaneously, science was beginning to more thoroughly study the body’s physiology, including how fat was added and whether there were correlations between body fat and disease. By 1917, the simplest conclusion was that people became fat and unhealthy by eating the wrong foods too much of the time. It was “overindulgence,” period.
The birth of the weight loss industry brought books like 1917’s Food and Life: Eat Right and Be Normal, which purported to restore “persons overweight or underweight to their proper proportions and symmetry.”
But what was proper? Determining that in the U.S. was left entirely to life insurance companies. Using height and weight charts, population averages, and eventually body mass index (BMI), companies applied basic arithmetic to determine a person’s “ideal weight,” ergo, eligibility for insurance. Combined with actuarial and medical studies that correlated obesity with health conditions like diabetes and heart disease, insurance companies suggested “overweight” people died sooner. They determined this by essentially looking at a person and checking a box. Genetics or medical conditions be damned.
According to Amanda M. Czerniawski, author of From Average to Ideal, this “heralded an era in which weight was quantified into pounds of flesh, and a new concern emerged — the fight against fat.”
In order to meet insurance standards, people had to know how much they weighed. Doctors had previously recommended people use penny scales, originally intended to weigh freight in public places like railway stations and markets. But by 1910 or so, home scales became available to purchase for about $10. With that, weighing yourself went from a public to a private act. But more importantly, it turned into a chronic act.
The approach was emotionally disastrous. With such a codified link between weight and health—and the presumption of overindulgence and laziness on the part of fat people—body shaming became officially sanctioned.
With a scale always nearby, the pressure to closely track incremental weight losses and gains was amplified. The age of the fad diet was born (and has arguably never died).
People were increasingly advised to adopt regulated eating regimens, schedule weight checkins with friends, and begin fasting. Published in 1918, Diet and Health With Key to the Calories advised eating nothing but potatoes and skim milk one day per week. Author Lulu Hunt Peters wrote:
“Instead of being looked upon with friendly tolerance and amusement, you are now viewed with distrust, suspicion, and even aversion! How dare you hoard fat when our nation needs it? You don’t dare to any longer. You never wanted to be fat anyway…”
In fact, despite the thousands of studies around weight and health, we still haven’t proven much more than the occasional correlation between them. But correlation is not causation, as Harriet Brown writes for Slate. If a fat person loses weight, they do not automatically become “healthy,” as a thin person may or may not be. We still don’t know all that it means to be fat and healthy.
Modern weight-loss approaches haven’t improved on the bathroom scale. If anything, they have intensified the compulsive monitoring. Digital scales allow access to more numbers than ever (body fat percentage, BMI, water ratio), and wearables like Fitbit literally attach measurements to one’s body — a connected bathroom scale wherever you go.
Some therapists, nutritionists, and practitioners want to put agency back in the hands of individuals—without a scale, a cleanse, or even a Fitbit challenge. Research has found that people who deliberately lose weight will actually end up with a slower metabolism at the end of dieting. Approaches like Health at Every Size support the goal of achieving health separate from weight, by relying primarily on self-regulation. In some cases, that simply means eating mindfully rather than counting calories, finding joy in all kinds of physical activity, and finally waving goodbye to that bathroom scale.
