I don’t like to be ordered to hop on the scale. Never have.
I hated it at ten when my Camp JCA bus stopped to let us out to weigh us by the side of the road. Suppose it was for the benefit of showing parents their kid dropped a few pounds while spending two weeks eating matzoh and bad scrambled eggs in the woods at Barton Flats. And I always did come home ten pounds thinner.
I didn’t like it growing up in a home where my father lauded us with praise based on how chubby or slender we appeared at any given time. Home from college looking thin? Wow, here’s a $50 for a new top from Macy’s. Ooops, chubs again? How ’bout just that glance up and down and a frown.
I didn’t like it when I was pregnant with my first daughter and realized Red Vines are not a good, low carb snack, that BBQ beef sandwiches may not be the answer to that aversion to salads, and a box of Sees Candies is the devil masked in the angelic face of Mary, the old gal on the label. The scale shot up during those nine months, but I eventually lost it. Still hated the scale. Mostly hated the nurses who ordered me to weigh.
More than anything, I didn’t like it last week when I returned to my doctor after having a successful physical a few months back. I had a cold and wanted some meds. I didn’t want to talk about my weight.
Dr. Davis was happy back in August when I was dropping some weight. I’m not that big, mind you, but like my dad, the doctor is very obsessed with women being thin, I guess. Anyway, I had strayed a bit from Weight Watchers since my daughter’s Bat Mitzvah in October and he noticed. Oh boy, he really zinged me.
“I see you have put on a few pounds since you were here last,” he scolded, seconds after I gushed over how wonderful the Bat Mitzvah weekend had been.
True, I had dropped about eighteen pounds over the summer and I probably put back around five. How kind of him to notice, since I was simply there for a miserable chest cold or some other scary virus. What did my weight have to do with anything? Was it his duty to whip me into shape for health reasons or was he simply another man fixated on women and their weight?
It did the trick, though, just like at camp and when my dad gave me the cold shoulder. It made me think what a big fat freak I must be at five pounds over what I should weigh. That is the kind of blow that sends you back to Weight Watchers, but for the wrong reasons. It’s the kind of blow that also makes you want to fire your male internist and find a woman who might not be so obsessed with a woman weighs.
