45 kilos in 27 months. Not a single weigh-in.

I have had a scale connected to my phone since the autumn of 2017, and everything I have ever weighed is stored in one file. It can be exported into a spreadsheet and looked at as plain text.

It is not a record of my weight. It is a record of when I was willing to look at myself.

Autumn 2017

I weigh myself almost every day. Sometimes twice — in the morning and then once more during the day, as if something could change in a couple of hours.

The numbers hold between a hundred and five and a hundred and seven. I have my first big weight loss behind me, and a few months earlier I ran my first race. Back then I thought of myself as an athlete.

A man who weighs himself twice a day has it under control. Or at least he thinks so, which in that moment is the same thing.

Then it thins out

End of November. Beginning of December. And six weeks of nothing.

In January 2018 the table says 111.8. Five and a half kilos up in six weeks.

I remember exactly what I told myself then. That it was not that bad yet. That it could still be turned around.

I kept repeating that sentence for a very long time after it stopped being true.

Three more measurements. February. February. And March 22nd, 2018, 110.3 kg.

Then nothing.

Why I stopped

Not because I forgot.

Every step onto that scale was a message that things were not getting better. And I had nothing left to balance that message with. Every time I stepped on it I lost a piece of hope — and a man who is running out of hope starts to ration it.

So I stopped. Not with a decision, not with any kind of declaration. I simply stopped getting on that scale, and that solved the problem for a while. I stopped seeing it.

Stopping weighing yourself is far easier than stopping gaining weight. That is probably the only thing from that period I can state as a lesson.

Tomorrow

Every morning I told myself: tomorrow. Tomorrow I will get up and start. Tomorrow I will quit sweets.

It was not a lie. In that moment I truly believed it. That is why it worked — that "tomorrow" let me get through the day without having to look at what I was doing.

Tomorrow never came. Not once. For two and a half years straight.

June 11th, 2020

The next entry in that file is from June 11th, 2020. 155.3 kg.

Between those two lines there are twenty-seven months and forty-five kilos. There is not a trace of them in the diary — no rising curve, nothing to follow. One dot at the bottom and one dot at the top.

That is not an error in the data. That is exactly what happened.

That empty space in the graph is the period when I did not want to know anything about myself. And the number 155.3 is not there because I was documenting my fall. It is there because after two years I finally stood on the scale.

Three days earlier they had delivered the treadmill.

I am writing about this in the book — chapter A Glimmer of Light That Vanished in the Dark.