Even as a fitness professional I find it laughable at how easily I let the numbers on my scale dictate my mood, my day, and my overall success as a human being. I can have a great week of workouts, eating clean, and drinking plenty of water but if I step on the scale and it hasn't budged or even worse, has gone up...even by 0.1 on my digital scale, I become infuriated! On the other hand, if I come off a lazy weekend of bingeing and bad decisions and decide to step on the scale to assess the damage and there is no change or amazingly it's somehow lower, I start whistling and doing my best Carlton Banks-Tom Jones dance impression. Why do we (I) do this? I know it’s unreasonable but the silliness of it really hit me this past week when I realized I do this in many other areas of life. We see this all the time when someone posts a beautiful selfie on social media depicting an amazing or courageous story and it get hundreds of likes and positive comments. Sadly, though, it will be those one or two negative comments from internet trolls that then casts a shadow over the success story and the overflow of positive comments. Just like how a negative comment should not take away from the success in a beautiful post, neither should an unchanged or increased scale number take away from the progress made in a week of great workouts and clean eating. The scale is just one checkpoint in the total fitness regime. If I know that I've been doing all the right things and staying true to my fitness plan, then I need to look at the total picture (how my clothes fit, my energy levels, the appearance of my skin, hair, nails etc.) instead of basing my emotions and success on solely what the digital scale (or trolls) say.