196. You’re Not a Number: Why Healing From The Scale Is the Real Weight Loss
196. You’re Not a Number: Why Healing From The Scale Is the Real Weight Loss
If you’ve ever stood on the scale and let the number determine your mood, your meals, or your sense of worth… this post is for you.
In Episode 196 of the Embodied Writing Warrior Podcast, Kayla MacDonald dives deep into the emotional, psychological, and systemic ways the scale holds women back from true food freedom. Drawing from personal experience, cultural commentary, and narrative alchemy, she unpacks:
3 Hidden Ways the Scale Keeps You Trapped:
You're Stuck in Math Class: Constantly measuring, calculating, and analyzing your worth like a math problem instead of living a story worth telling.
You're Still Fighting for a Smaller Body: Even when you say you believe in Health at Every Size, old programming might still be dictating your goals.
You're Chasing External Validation: When your habits are driven by the hope of weight loss, they’re often unsustainable. And they’re not truly for you.
This episode also features:
A dream sequence with Julia from Nip/Tuck
A classroom rebellion scene starring Rex and Haven, rewriting the diet-culture script
Four juicy writing prompts designed to get you back in touch with your worth
Plus, Kayla shares why she’s going scale-free for 7 weeks for the first time in her life—and how she’s making creativity, not weight loss, her new North Star.
Embodied Activation:
Choose one or more of the following writing prompts and journal from the voice of the version of you who already knows her body is worthy:
What if my body has never betrayed me—but I’ve betrayed her by believing the world’s lies?
If I didn’t need to shrink to be safe… what would I allow myself to feel?
What’s the sexiest thing my body has ever done—just for me?
What if softness isn’t weakness? What if softness is power?
When you’re ready to stop counting calories and start telling better stories, this episode is your invitation.
Mentioned In This Episode
Transcript
Welcome to another episode of the Embodied Writing Warrior Podcast. If you've tuned in to this episode, I'm going to imagine it's because you've had a problematic relationship with the scale.
This episode is for you if:
You know exactly what your healthy BMI range is and even though you know BMI doesn't tell the whole story - because now it's pretty weaponized by insurance companies so they can charge higher premiums - you still secretly WANT to be in that coveted "healthy" range.
You either avoid the scale because you don't want to know or you weigh daily to stay "accountable" and "focused"... or maybe you bounce between the two extremes depending on what's happening in your life.
You know you're more than your body, more than a number, more than a metric, but it's still hard to untangle the final few knots of diet culture.
You sometimes feel like a bad feminist, or like you’re betraying your own values, because part of you still wants the goal weight, the smaller body, the lower dress size… even if you also believe in Health At Every Size.
If this is resonating, this episode is going to be medicine.
And... double bonus points if you used to watch Nip/Tuck back in the day. You're going to get an extra kick out of this episode.
I'm going to share:
3 ways the scale is holding you back from food freedom.
I'm going to share why it can be so difficult to break up with the scale, especially as a high performing, Type A women - this episode isn't about shaming you for having a problematic relationship with the scale. It's honouring how society, popular culture, and your own lived experiences have led to these challenging relationships.
How to rewrite your relationship with weight, worth, and health once and for all - which means, if you do take the leap and choose to step off the scale, you're doing it for reasons that align with your values and the life you want to live - versus doing it out of fear or avoidance.
This is a big episode for me and honestly? It wasn't one that was in the queue. But, it's also one that's been very alive for me lately and also inspired by some of the powerful conversations I've had on the show with my guests.
And I think somtimes, when something is really alive, it's a message that one of you needs to hear sooner rather than later. So, I'm sharing it today.
This is something that came alive for me based on my own recent lived experiences. It's interesting that, as I get ready to launch Food Freedom Fantasy - which is seriously the most powerful, magical thing I've EVER created - the Universe has shown me a few key places where I'm still not fully free... yet.
Now, here's a confession that's a little embarrassing but also real.
Over the years, I've let go of SO many old, misaligned habits that were rooted in diet culture.
Diets & Meal Plans.
Counting calories and macros.
Excessive restriction.
Overexercising.
Doing workout programs I hated just because they were supposed to be the "best" for weight loss. I literally only do movement I love now.
Forbidding any foods or labeling any food as "bad".
But... there was one old diet culture relic I've been holding onto in secret... the scale.
I have long since stopped using the scale as the only measure of progress. But I've still been incredibly resistant to giving up my daily weigh in habit.
I told myself all kinds of stories about it.
I told myself it was a simple way to stay focused on my goal of health and alignment with my habits... as if I needed a number to tell me whether or not I kept the promises I made to myself on a given day.
I told myself I was training to have a neutral, nonreactive response to the scale, no matter what it said, and I could get more practice by putting daily reps in.
And while I would not recommend daily weigh ins to any clients I'd work with... I was different. Because I'd done so much inner work, I didn't make my weight mean anything about me anymore. I could still step on the scale daily as an accountability tool and not be affected emotionally... when honestly, that's like drinking a mickey of vodka every morning and being like "yeah, well, it doesn't affect me because I do it every morning. I'm not drunk. Honest."
It's amazing, the stories our ego can create to keep us stuck.
More recently, I had to come face to face with the truth - the scale is not just an accountability tool. And I'm not free from the very real challenges that come from using it as a measure of progress.
Here's how it went down:
I put on some weight during the month leading up to the move. And it was a combination of lowered activity, moving stress, more dinners out at restaurants as we saying all our good-byes and honestly... more emotional eating than usual.
But, for once, I'm like, "Yeah. I'm human. I'm going to give myself grace and move on."
Which I've done and since moving to Prince George, I've returned to my usual, aligned habits with ease. Mindful eating. A nourishing, evening routine that sets me up to have a great night's sleep, all the things.
But for basically a week straight... no movement on the scale. And as someone who's had a habit of weighing in almost daily since the age of 17 or 18... the math wasn't mathing.
This frustration, the inner work I did around it, and a pretty profound dream I had, inspired this episode.
Speaking of math not mathing... let's get into these 3 ways the scale is holding you back from food freedom... even if you're a little bit in denial about this reality like I was.
Reason #1:
You're stuck in math class versus erotic storytelling 301. And if you don't know what Erotic Storytelling 301 is... episode 186 - What if you're already worthy - escaping the validation trap and writing your own ticket - is going to be your go-to. That episode is the one that marked a big creative uplevel for this podcast. And since then, I've fallen back in love with podcasting.
I stopped worrying about downloads and metrics and chose to create from a place of play and inspiration and creativity. It no longer became about what I thought would get the most engagement. It became about the content my heart wanted to create, and now I'm having SO much fun creating these episodes for you and I honestly think they're WAY more powerful.
So I left math class when it came to podcasting and social media but with my health and fitness journey? I still had a hard time giving up the scale. Of taking the goal weight off the altar and deciding I'm enough right now and I'm truly, for real, going to put the focus on seeing my body as worthy and enough in all its phases.
Bu here's the thing - if you are weighing yourself daily and trying to convince yourself that you're not attaching SOME part of your worth to it. I'm going to give you some fiery, straight-talk: that's not real. If you're checking that often, part of you believes it needs to control the number, and that the number you see MEANS something about you.
But here's the thing: you're the one telling the story about what those numbers mean in the first place. And also, the more you outsource meaning to metrics, the less inner power you have.
This is why, wherever possible, you want to get out of math class and ditch the hyper focus on numbers and focus on the stories you're telling about yourself and your unconditional worthiness.
Reason #2: If you're still attached to the scale, you're probably still locked in a fight for a smaller body. You're probably not weighing yourself JUST to check. You're probably weighing in to make sure you're still in a certain range, at the very least.
Now, here's where I want you to give yourself a lot of grace and a lot of compassion. You're not weak. You're not a bad femininst or helping the patriarchy by wanting to shrink yourself.
The work to fully untangle yourself from diet culture and this pursuit of a smaller body is deep and it's not just about you. It's systemic. You're not alone. You're actually in very good company because so many powerful women struggle with this.
The night before having the wild dream that inspired this episode, I was reading Girl on Girl by Sophie Gilbert. This book breaks down how the pop culture of the 90's and 2000's turned women against themselves. So, if you're also a millennial woman... you have this push-pull relationship between diet culture and the body positivity movement because of the messages you were sent growing up.
I was reading the chapter called "Beautiful Girl" and it referenced makeover shows like The Swan or extreme weight loss shows like The Biggest Loser.
I perked up right away because I wrote a paper on The Swan for my gender studies class. I was actually going to write about The Swan and Nip/Tuck but my TA was like, "No, Nip/Tuck would need its own damn paper" and she wasn't wrong.
As for The Biggest Loser... I watched every single season, every single episode. To be honest, I was inspired to become a personal trainer because of that show. I used to idolize Jillian Michaels.
And then I wondered why I had a toxic relationship to the health coaching industry and also, why I could give up every other part of diet culture but the scale.
Let's start with The Swan and other similar makeover shows. If you're not familiar with the show, it was where they took women who were considered "ugly ducklings" by society's standards and took them through this huge physical transformation using every plastic surgery under the sun. Gross.
And this only one of many extreme makeover shows that popped in this era. Sophie Gilbert writes, "More than ever before, people's exteriors were understood to reflect their inner identities, both of which seemed malleable and endlessly improvable. Cosmetic surgeries were widely touted to and understood to be fixes for the imperfect self, with reality shows in particular hammering home the message that becoming skinny, hot, and sexy, would change a person's life."
So... maybe you've unconsciously absorbed the message that simply having a skinnier body will change your life and if you have, it's because the messages are everywhere. I'm not a big TV person so I think those makeover shows are now out of fashion, but then you have hundreds of thousands of influencers with their before and afters and acting like their entire life got better once they lost weight. And maybe parts of it did, but they're probably also not telling you the whole story.
And then there's The Biggest Loser, which yes, I used to be inspired by. It's a little embarrassing to admit it, but I also know I wasn't alone because this show had tens of millions of viewers watching at its peak. And I think many of those people, like me, went to it wanting to be inspired. On the surface and with the storytelling they did, it looked like these contestants were changing their lives for the better... not just physically but also by confronting some of their personal demons as well.
But looking back and also reading this book, I'm like, "how?" Sophie Gilbert talks about how this show was built on shame and it was disguised as tough love.
Maybe now you're thinking about the media you've been exposed to over the years and you realize, "Yeah. A lot of those shows or mediums were sending a message that smaller = better. That smaller = worthy."
So - that's reason 2. Your attachment to the scale might be coming from societal messages that are keeping you stuck in comparison or low self-worth.
Finally, reason number 3 - any habit change created with the intention of getting into a smaller body is not sustainable. And if you're embarking on any type of habit change and then checking the scale every day wondering if it's "helping" yet - that habit is not going to be sustainable because you're attaching it to an external metric.
This is something Stephanie Dodier touched on in her interview - which I'll link for you in the description - and it had me thinking more deeply about my own patterns. This one thing she said that is worth revisiting even if you listened to the episode in its entirety. She said:
"Now I want to caution anybody listening to that, changing a behavior, a health behavior, eating behavior, exercise behavior anchored in weight loss. Is still proven to be highly unsuccessful because the motivator of this new health behavior, or this modified health behavior is still external to you. You're still leaning in to your body, shrinking in order for you to be motivated to sustain that behavior. We have to get body shrinking completely off the storyline and change the behavior for you to have. The life that you want, a better relationship with yourself, more mobility, whatever the situation may be, but not about shrinking the body."
Remembering this AND pulling The Tower card on the same day made me realize this is exactly what I'd been doing with my recent meditation process.
I'm four weeks into something called The Presence Process, which is a 10 week experience to help you heal unintegrated emotions and experiences from your earliest years through a certain type of breathwork. It's been SO powerful and also since starting it... my weight has gone up and then plateaued.
And THIS has probably made me extra frustrated because on one hand most of me wanted the emotional benefits. To feel calmer. More peaceful. Less reactive and more open-hearted.
But deep down, there was this other part who wanted to do this process to have a more regulated system because I thought more regulated nervous system = less emotional eating and also, less chronic stress, which meant I'd have an easier time finally reaching my weight loss goals.
Instead, interestingly enough, the opposite has happened. And It's a humbling moment because the Presence Process talks about this.
Michael Brown writes: "When we in any way make up our mind what outcome we want, we energetically bind and restrict the motion of the underlying point of causality, and this in turn adds to our dicomfort."
There was a part of who'd made up her mind about what result I secretly wanted to achieve by doing this process. And this was actually keeping me from getting the true medicine, which was integrating the emotional experience from the past. And here's the thing - I've struggled with my weight since the age of 6 or 7. I've had unintegrated emotional charge about not belonging, about being too much, about being "bad" for my size since I was a child.
And by hoping this process would help me change the effect - instead of the root cause - I kept myself stuck in suffering, in the cage of trying to fix the outside when the inside needed the upgrade.
This takes me to the dream I had that inspired this episode. In this dream, I was house-sitting for one my spiritual mentors while he was on a date with some woman. While I was house-sitting, Julia from Nip/Tuck showed up. For those who've never seen this show, she's the wife of one of the plastic surgeons.
She had a bouquet of flowers, most likely for my mentor and when she realized he wasn't home and out with someone else, she dumped the flowers into garbage can and stormed out dramatically.
If we're interpreting this - the spiritual mentor could easily represents the Presence Process - something done in the name of emotional integration and inner wholeness... supposedly.
But the mentor is on a date with someone else - in this case, maybe on date with external validation of society's beauty standards. And Julia could represent the feminine - the female body who actually wants to be loved, appreciated, taken care of, and accepted... not for the sake of being shrunk to a smaller size, but because she deserves to feel good and be taken care of.
Alright, and this is where we bring in some ReWrite Me magic - because while you might have parts of yourself who are still struggling to break up with diet culture, you also have parts of you that know better. You have parts that DO love you as you are, regardless of size. They just want you to feel good.
And this is where we bring in our two Divine Masculine Archetypes, Rex and Haven, to help ReWrite this scene. Like I said, listening to episode 186 first is going to make this next scene land so much harder but even if not, you'll get the gist of it. Me and Julia are in crappy old math class but Sean and Christian - the plastic surgeons from the show - was teaching today. Here's the scene:
The room smells like antiseptic and shame.
Fluorescent lights hum.
You and Julia stand in your bras and panties—stripped, assessed, objectified like cadavers with soft thighs and opinions.
At the front of the classroom, Christian Troy and Sean McNamara write numbers like they’re sacred law:
“Total Daily Energy Expenditure = BMR x Activity Factor...”
“1200 calories a day should be plenty.”
“Tell us, Kayla. Julia. What don’t you like about yourselves?”
Their red pens uncap with a sickening click.
They step forward—Sean tilting his head with mock concern. Christian smirking.
Lines are drawn across your belly.
Arrows point to your thighs.
Numbers hover above your chest.
Julia’s trembling, lips pursed.
You’re frozen, heat rising to your ears.
And then—
SLAM.
The door bursts open so hard it ricochets off the wall.
Enter: REX
Boots.
Snarl.
Jaw locked like he could chew through concrete.
He stalks to the front without a word, lifts an entire student desk, and hurls it across the room.
It smashes into the chalkboard, erasing a week's worth of diet doctrine.
“You wanna talk about flaws?” he growls, yanking the red marker from Christian’s hand.
“How about I write ‘Compensating For Insecurity’ across your pretty-boy face? See how you like being analyzed.”
Christian stumbles back.
Sean tries to interject—“This is just science—”
“No. This is violence.” Rex’s voice is low and dangerous now.
“And the only numbers that matter are the zero chances you’ve got of laying another finger on her.”
He snaps the red pen in half.
Enter: HAVEN
He moves like a whisper.
A presence. Not a performance.
He kneels beside you first—eyes full of knowing—and pulls out a warm, damp cloth that smells like vanilla and eucalyptus.
He starts with your belly.
“This mark doesn’t belong here.” Wipe.
“This story was never yours.” Wipe.
“You were never the problem.” Wipe.
He moves to Julia next—soft, steady hands. Her breathing eases for the first time.
From his satchel, he pulls two silk robes:
A rosy blush-pink one for Julia.
A lavender one for you, that catches the light like moonstone.
“Let’s get out of here,” he says gently.
“There’s another class starting.”
Transition: Erotic Storytelling 301
You walk barefoot out of the classroom and into something warmer.
The lights are low.
The air smells like cardamom and cedar.
There’s a king-sized bed in the center of the room, covered in journals, quills, and tangled sheets.
Julia looks around, stunned. You take her hand.
The Warden steps forward (hooded, cloaked, a cross between a dungeon master and a tantric priestess).
“Welcome,” she says, voice like velvet and fire.
“Today’s writing prompts are not for shrinking. They’re for reclaiming.”
She writes on the whiteboard:
WRITING PROMPTS:
What if my body has never betrayed me—but I’ve betrayed her by believing the world’s lies?
If I didn’t need to shrink to be safe… what would I allow myself to feel?
What’s the sexiest thing my body has ever done—just for me?
What if softness isn’t weakness? What if softness is power?
You all curl up on the bed—robes slipping off shoulders, journals in hand.
Haven wraps an arm around you.
Rex sits behind you like a furnace, watching over the room.
Julia exhales and finally speaks:
“I think... I’ve hated myself for no good reason.”
And you say:
“Then let’s write a better one.”
So... one of your embodied activations is to journal on those prompts for yourself. Pick one or all four. You can find them at embodiedwritingwarrior.com/podcast.
And then... maybe your other one is to, like me, consider breaking up with the scale. In the past, I've struggled with this decision because it's come from one of two places:
A. My eating habits have been super misaligned. There's been a lot of self-abandonment, a lot of binge eating to avoid difficult emotions, so I didn't want to know what was happening.
or B. I was in a plateau or frustrated with the slow rate of movement, so I thought, maybe I'll stop weighing myself so I can stop stressing about it and then it will finally move.
In this season, I have to be personally be careful not to let it turn into the latter. I have to commit to letting go of the scale not because I think it'll help me break through a plateau, but because I genuinely want to see myself as worthy and enough right now and at any other size.
It looks like no longer posting about weight loss at all. It looks like not posting anymore before and after photos, which I've only done here or there anyways.
And it looks like really getting clear on what I DO want my business card to be. And it's not my body transformation. I want my voice and my storytelling to be my business card. So that's where I get to put my energy now. On creativity. On using storytelling and narrative alchemy to create deeper inside out transformation not just for me, but also for those listening and being supported by me in my containers.
That's real freedom... and it doesn't require a goal weight to be achieved.
So start to ask yourself... what do you value? What would you love to put your energy and attention on if you weren't focused on the scale? Make that your North Star. And then, when you do make choices to move your body or eat nourishing foods, it's for those reasons. I know I'm more creative when I'm dancing and running and lifting weights. I know I have more focus and clarity and bigger connection to my creative channel when I'm eating mostly whole foods and not using highly processed foods for emotional reasons.
I now get to let those be the reasons. And for at least the next 7 weeks, I'm going scale free. And here's the thing - I've never gone scale free for more than a month. This is big. And I'm committed to it. And my belief is that, after the 7 weeks, especially if they're 7 weeks where I'm focused on truly valuing myself for who I am, not what I weigh, why would I even want to go back to the scale? Because I think the greatest freedom possible is being someone who shows up and loves herself without worrying about what a number on the scale says.
And if you want to dive deeper into this journey and get deep support for breaking free from all the chains keeping you stuck in cycles of chronic dieting, low self-worth, and emotional eating, I would recommend two things:
The first is to check out the giveaway I'm running. In the lead up to my book launch, you have four ways to enter to win one of two free spots into the beta round of Food Freedom Fantasy. They are low-cost, low-effort ways to enter - reading and reviewing some of my books or leaving a review or rating of this podcast, and each thing you do gets you an additional entry to win. You can learn more at embodiedwritingwarrior.com/giveaway.
You can also join the waitlist/newsletter to make sure you don't miss the updates for when this program goes live. You can do so by heading over to embodiedwritingwarrior.com/gift. In addition to being added to the mailing list, you'll also get The Power Portal - my free 2 day experience which helps you turn your biggest blocks around food, eating, and body image into vehicles for transformation.
I'll include links to everything - books mentioned, podcast episodes, and how to potentially win your spot into my upcoming program - in the episode description. Until next time, this is me reminding you that you are so much more than any number and you get to walk out of math class any time you choose.
