“Doesn’t it bother you?”

That’s typically the response I get when I tell people that I haven’t weighed myself in over two years. And the answer is always (thankfully) no, never. Actually, it bothered me more to know what I weighed and it bothered me even more to know that the number wasn’t dramatically changing day by day. Ever since I made the decision to stop stepping on the scale in high school, I have felt a sense a freedom. In all honestly, I worry about everything in my life way too much, and it’s nice to have to worry about one less thing, especially if that thing is a miscalculation of my self-worth.

I’m not going to lie, in the beginning, it was super hard. I had been trained my entire life to believe that the number on the scale meant so much more than the amount of gravity weighing down on you. I obsessively checked my weight every day, as if the number really was going to change in 24 hours. Even as a 10-year-old, I remember constantly checking even though I had no idea what “range” I was supposed to be in. As I got older, I was bogged down by BMI’s and height-to-weight ratios that the Internet told me I needed to be in to have any sense of self-love. Why did no one on the Internet have the sense to project the fact that your weight really had no correlation to how you look or how healthy you were? It didn’t help that it seemed as if everyone in my friend group flaunted how little they weighed or that our soccer coach would yell at us about cookies for fear that the number would go up.

Deep into my high school years, it became a problem and I needed to stop. My life was slowly being consumed by the menacing number on the little two by six screen. Somehow, I threw away my scale (looking back, I wish I had smashed it like some angsty teen in a movie) and despite a few mistakes and accidental peeps at the doctors, I haven’t look back since.

There is no need for you to weigh yourself, unless you know it won’t create a problem for you. Why would you want yet another number to tell you something about yourself? The average American is not trained in nutrition, weight and overall health. Instead of weighing myself, I go to my annual check-up with my physician, and she lets me know if everything is OK, and that’s it. No inaccurate numbers, no weight goals and definitely no body shaming. If something is wrong, she makes healthy suggestions that don’t lead to me to shame myself and set unrealistic goals that are probably unhealthier. For the first time in probably seven years, I have felt a freedom I have never felt while weighing myself. By not assigning myself a number, I am free to be whoever I want to be and that definitely involves a lot of self-love.