{"id":69627,"date":"2022-01-24T07:30:48","date_gmt":"2022-01-24T06:30:48","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/runlovers.it\/2022\/how-to-get-along-with-the-scale\/"},"modified":"2022-12-14T16:38:23","modified_gmt":"2022-12-14T15:38:23","slug":"how-to-get-along-with-the-scale","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/runlovers.it\/en\/2022\/how-to-get-along-with-the-scale\/","title":{"rendered":"How to get along with the scale"},"content":{"rendered":"

I<\/span> don’t think I’ve ever known a person who liked to weigh himself. The scale is a bit like a strange mirror: it never seems to return the image we have of ourselves. If it indicates too much weight, it leads us to be disappointed; if it indicates too little, it worries us. It is also common for people who are objectively in perfect shape to find that something in their body is not right.
\nBoth because I am not an expert on the matter (I am not a psychologist) and because the discussion would get too long, I will not go into the details of why many of us are so dependent on the numerical value provided by a measuring instrument. After all, it is a number, that is, something neutral, per se.
\nThe more interesting thing instead is about how a distorted relationship with the scale can affect your athletic activity and, more generally, your mental health.<\/p>\n

It’s just a number<\/h3>\n

We often insist on how silly it is to derive our serenity from a number and, at the same time, how little that number can tell us about our true state of health.
\nHave you ever heard of BMI (body mass index)? You can get it simply by a formula and it tells you-not much. It can give you an idea of where your body is in the normal, underweight or overweight range.
\nHowever, it is also a number that can mislead: people with similar BMI but different heights are different physical types, yet to the BMI system they are identical people.<\/p>\n

SBMI was introduced<\/a> to address the fallacy of this system; it considers other variables such as gender and age, giving you a more accurate idea of your physical state, based not only on your body weight.<\/p>\n

Even with this system, however, you get a number: it is new, it is different from the one express by the scale, but it is still a number.
\nNo more numbers!<\/p>\n

What that number doesn’t tell you<\/h3>\n

In this age of data, we should have realized how much everything, phenomenon, event or fact is representable with data. The more deeply and intelligently the data are analyzed, the truer the image they are able to render. Think about how much data goes into giving a vague idea of what a human body looks like: height, weight, measurements of various circumferences, age, blood pressure, heart rate, etc. And these are data that describe perhaps 1 percent of a body. Yet we keep sticking to just that: weight.<\/p>\n

So let us see what the weight does not tell us:<\/p>\n