WOW. Who knew such a world existed? Who knew? I’ve be en left flabbergasted.
I’ve not been so amazed about something since ... well, I doubt I’ve ever been this amazed.
This began one day last week when, after a stern talk with myself, I decided that I should really start embracing my new life as a fat fighter.
This, I decided, could only be done with the aid of a fat fighting implement - the rest of the world may or may not call them weighing scales.
I will purchase one, I told myself, I will do it.
While this might seem like a regular, every day occurrence for most people, it is not for me.
Weighing scales were never part of my vocabulary. They just didn’t have a place in my life, you know ... because they told you how much you weighed and, to be perfectly frank, I never wanted to know.
Self-preservation, that’s what I like to call it.
For years I avoided the scales like a vampire avoids the sunlight.
If I saw it in a room, I would shun it, slightly convinced it was taunting me or if I were feeling particularly feisty I might offer it a kick as I ran past.
This ended when I became a fat fighter.
There was a funny moment when I found out how much I weighed: the offending numbers popped up on the screen and I was blind-sided, I actually near-ly passed out from shock.
“Stupid f**king weighing scales,” I fumed. “It’s a liar! Look at it, with its lying eyes and its lying face smirking at me. I hate it.”
Eventually I came to my senses and realised that the weighing scales was merely an instrument sent onto this world to torment me but really, it wasn’t the scales’s fault, it was my own.
And so, I decided to buy one. The last time I encountered a weighing scales was sometime back in the early ’90s when we had one at home. It was black with a little dial which shot across a small screen as you got on, eventually stopping on a random number which was coloured red. Antiquated is probably the best description.
Where does one even buy such a thing nowadays, I asked myself? Where?
I took to the worldwide web to find my answer. And find my answer I did.
Who knew? My God, who knew?
Weighing scales are not weighing scales any more. They have transformed in to bizarre, technological instruments of doom.
I’ll admit, I was shocked. When did this happen, I ask you?
They aren’t just weighing scales anymore; oh no, they are USB Body Analysers and Monitoring Precision Scales and Heavy Duty Precision Electronic Scales and 4 in 1 Body Analysers and Memory Precision thingys.
Like you have to plug things into computers and you have to press buttons and you have to get batteries and all this sort of malarky and they can memo-rise how fat you are and they can shout at you and analyse you and everything.
It blew my mind, it blew my mind. I couldn’t take all the in --formation in; it was too much.
They all sound like they were developed as torture instruments by the US military.
One of them “tracks and charts your weight and body analysis readings on-line by connecting the scale’s removable display to your PC”.
Then it can: “hold up to 56 sets of readings and can be used by up to four people” and it “measures body weight, BMI, BMR, body fat, body water and bone mass” and it has a “global tracker via the website”.
What is that like, what is it? I was too scared to buy it, given that it sounded like it might try to kill me.
I did manage to buy a scales in the end. I told the man in the shop I wanted a scales that just did one thing and one thing only: gave me my weight when I stood on it.
He said they didn’t have anything like that but he did manage to provide me with the most basic one in the shop ... which is still too technologically advanced for my liking.