This morning, on day three of Zepbound, I sat staring at the scale across the room, tucked under the bathroom cabinet yet somehow still covered in dust that nearly hid the footprints from who-knows-when the last time was someone stepped on it.

Then I remembered the other scale. It was 1985 and I was eight years old, and my mother had put me on a diet. She had taken a half-sheet of poster board and made a grid so I could write in my weight each day, and there were pictures of hot fudge sundaes from Mayberry’s that I could have with Grandma as treats if I made goals.

I went from 87 pounds to 58 pounds on my first diet. We were still using pencils instead of pens at school and I knew nothing about training bras, but I knew about calories.

That scale had a small dial on the edge, just behind the window showing the judge-and-jury needle and wheel of numbers, that allowed me to adjust where “zero” fell on the scale. It was a way to cheat. I couldn’t cheat much, but I could knock off a pound, a pound and a half. It felt good to do that.

This morning, as I sat, I realized that was intended to do what the large green scales with chunky sliding weights, the ones at the doctors’ offices, could not do. It was to adjust for clothing.

Digital scales can’t do that. They display a red number that burns onto your retinas the evidence of your failure.

I’m not eight years old any longer, but I am still staring at a scale on the bathroom floor, wondering how to bend this painful universe of pounds and fat in my favor, somehow. Somehow.