Weight…seriously? The ups and downs of weight relevancy in the world
This past week, I visited a new healthcare provider, one who didn’t know about my history of eating disorders. First, the nurse prompted me to step onto a scale to take my weight. As I do with all new providers, I told her I do blind weights—I stand backward on the scale and ask the nurse to please not utter the number out loud.
This nurse politely obliged, adding with a laugh, “I never want to know my weight, either!” She didn’t know what seeing this number would have done to my past self, and I didn’t feel it necessary to tell her at the time. So I left it.
Test results from the procedure arrived in my inbox a few days later. I scanned the document but it may as well have been in Greek. I have a nursing degree, and I’ve reviewed a LOT of medical results throughout my recovery, but for these, I needed to turn on my extra keen eye so that I wouldn’t miss anything. And my keen eye did its job.
“Oh, Jesus,” I said out loud to no one. My eyes had only rested on the digits for a nanosecond, but that was all I needed to see that somehow, my weight had made its way into paperwork I was privy to. It was written in kilograms, but I knew the calculation like the back of my hand. (See stint in nursing school mentioned in the previous paragraph.)
Now, this is partially (well, maybe fully) my fault.
I had not specifically instructed this new provider to keep my weight off all communication sent to me, which is something I would have done with a provider I knew I would be seeing often. I had briefly mentioned I had a history of an eating disorder, but the story stopped there. Since I wasn’t there for anything ED-related, I felt more information wasn’t warranted.
Maybe I had been accustomed to providers omitting my weight from all comms between us.
Maybe I felt like I no longer needed to request that it be removed from any place my eyes would have access to.
Maybe subconsciously, I knew that seeing it wouldn’t mean anything to me anymore.
After all, it had been more than a decade since I dumped my bathroom scale. I had a vague idea of what I weighed, but it didn’t really affect me the way it used to.
But for some reason, this week when I saw the figure, it felt icky. I found myself trying to fight off the mental calculation, to just ignore it and hope that it would go away. But now, as I write this post, I still remember it.
I know weight is an arbitrary measurement that really doesn’t mean much in terms of our overall health. But somewhere deep within my still-recovering (and may always be recovering) mind, I had been conditioned to pay attention to that number, to revere it as much as fear it, and if it wasn’t what I wanted it to be, I had been taught to try and fix it.
This made me think more about the role weight plays in our society. And not just in the U.S. And not just in doctors’ offices.
Planes, pains, and automobiles: Weight regulations across transportation
Earlier this summer (on my birthday, no less), I read that the District of Columbia will remove all weight information from driver’s licenses as part of a new design rollout. Historically used as a personal identifier, the D.C. DMV argued it is no longer relevant.
According to a blurb I read in the August 2023 edition of Washingtonian magazine, “Because weight can fluctuate and the info on licenses is self-reported, it tends not to be a reliable way to help identify people.”
While D.C. isn’t the first “state” to implement this change, reading this felt like a positive step forward in building irrelevancy around body weight. Until a late-August article:
“Korean Air will weigh passengers and their baggage as part of a safety test in August and September.”
At first, I was shocked, which was probably the headline’s intention.
Weighing passengers? Doesn’t our luggage already go through enough weight scrutiny when it’s thrown on the scale at the check-in counter? Now people?
I also worried that this might be the preliminary stages of something worse, like a new measure to prevent people whose weight was deemed “too high” from boarding the plane entirely.
And, to have this decision made in a crowded airport terminal in front of onlooking travelers. Outrage boiled up inside me before I had even read the first paragraph.
As I read, I learned this initiative would require passengers to be weighed with their carry-on items at the boarding gate to ensure they meet “Aircraft Weight and Balance Management Standards,” which are enforced by Korea’s Ministry of Land, Infrastructure and Transportation.
The good news? Passengers can opt out.
The bad news? Korean Air isn’t the only airline to have done this.
Air New Zealand weighed international passengers for one month earlier this year as a follow-up to a previous survey in 2021. Their argument for doing so was to establish “average weights” from which they could better predict the aircraft’s ability to perform.
In a surprising moment of empathy, an Air New Zealand representative acknowledged the anxiety that can arise from stepping on a scale by saying:
“We know stepping on the scales can be daunting. No one can see your weight—not even us! It’s completely anonymous…and by weighing in, you’ll be helping us to fly you safely and efficiently, every time.”
My final thoughts
I’m a frequent traveler. I lived abroad for nearly eight years, and have been on more planes than I can count. I’ve seen my bags get weighed, measured, and stuffed into overhead-bin-sized boxes at the boarding gate to make sure they were small enough to board.
But I never felt like I would have to be small enough to board.
All of this is to say that I get why airlines have weight restrictions. It’s a safety thing.
The fact that the figure is only used internally and is never displayed to the passenger or the boarding gate attendant is reassuring. And, as a frequent flier, knowing airlines are taking action to make flying safer gives me peace of mind.
Travel isn’t what it used to be. Our faces are scanned, our privacy is violated, and we don’t always have the option to opt out.
Medical staff may mess up and accidentally reveal our weights. Or we (like I did) might forget to ask them to keep it a secret.
For now, weight is still something used by multiple industries, ostensibly for our own safety and our own health. So it’s up to us to make it irrelevant in our own minds.
Pause & Prompt
Would being weighed before a flight (even a blind weight) deter you from flying with that airline? Why/why not?
