I should have started writing this two weeks ago

Around three years ago the lithium batteries in my scale died. This was not really a problem to me. After all, lithium batteries seem just so hard to find and replace. They aren't, but the fact that they aren't long cylinders like the others somehow convinced me that they are. As a result of this mental block and my own laziness, I never bothered to replace them and so my scale just sat in the corner of my bathroom unused collecting dust and, as things are wont to do in bathrooms populated by people with body hair, collecting stray follicles.

It looked disgusting.

Beyond looking disgusting, though, it also allowed me to loosen the strings and get lazy. Weight is not an easy thing for me -- not easy to think about nor easy to maintain. In fact, three years ago I simply accepted that this would be a battle I was fated to fight for the rest of my life, a struggle to keep those three numbers in a somewhat reasonable range. This is easier said than done in most cases, and as I had no way or reason or bother to check those numbers on a daily basis I got lazy and the battle started to be lost. Considering I already had weighed more than I wanted to, this was a bad thing. In college I had weighed as little as 167 and spent most of my time in undergrad around 170. I didn't overeat, I exercised daily and while my diet still wasn't great, it wasn't horrendous either.

By the end of college I had creeped up to 190, a result of spending every night at the newspaper office and having a girlfriend who worked at Coldstone Creamery, though she is hardly to blame for my own lack of self control. I always had it in my mind to get back to 170 "one of these days" but I never really put the pedal to the metal and as long as I weighed myself regularly, I didn't go above 190 too strongly in one direction or the other. Until the batteries in my scale died, anyway.

In the three years since I paid no bother to checking my weight, I enjoyed the social aspects of being in my mid-20s and, well, beer tastes good. Really good. So over time as the pounds started to creep up and I reluctantly acknowledged that I'd need to go one notch looser on my belt, I always assumed that I'd simply lose the weight at some point and failed to notice that I was starting to lose the battle again. I had grown lazy, larger and in some ways, physically, a little unseemly for my taste.

After hosting some friends for dinner a few weeks ago, more than one of them made light of the disgusting scale in the corner of the bathroom and I started to realize that I was just like that scale, left to become disused and accrue unappealing physical characteristics. I am probably being too hard on myself. I'm not an ugly man -- I don't think anyway -- but in my mind I saw a clear parallel between that scale left unmaintained and my own body.