The scales lie...photos don't!

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I seem to be seeing a general theme this week in blog-world.  I've read a couple of very inspiring posts from people who struggle with weight loss and the number on the scale.  One thing I have noticed is that photos tell a very different story than the scale.  Scales lie.  Photos don't. 

You really should check out April's page on Sparkpeople.  She has photos of herself at the SAME weight and is visibly smaller in the later photos.  Strange?  No, not really.  I've always been told that if you are working out, your body changes even though the scale does not necessarily change.  "Muscle weighs more than fat"...hogwash I thought.  A pound of muscle weighs EXACTLY THE SAME as a pound of fat!  True.  BUT.  That one pound of muscle takes up LESS ROOM than the pound of fat.  Make sense?  In my head I know this, but in my heart I refused to believe anything but what the scales tell me.  To me, the scales are the be-all and the end-all of weight loss.  Now I am realizing that this is not so.  I wish I had realized this many months ago, but, alas, I am a slow learner. 

My friend Charlie at Operation Shrink Charlie's Big Butt also recently posted photos of herself on her blog.  Her photos show her in a bikini 10 pounds ago and now and what a difference!  You wouldn't think 10 pounds would make that much difference, but WOW...great job Charlie!  Charlie, like me, is a scale addict.  We weigh constantly.  I think her addiction might be a tad higher than mine on the addiction scale, but not much.  Get in in the morning, weigh myself, go to the bathroom, weigh myself, get a haircut/eyebrow wax, weigh myself (you never know how much that hair might have weighed folks!)...you get the idea.

I think I will start "weighing myself with the camera" if you will.  I'm not sure I'm ready to actually give up the scales like Charlie recently has (she's going to weigh in once a month), but maybe if I take photos every other week I might be able to see a difference there that I don't necessarily see on the scale.  I do so hope that the scales start moving faster though - being this close to 100lbs lost is killing me!!!  6.2 pounds to go!

Sorry for all the pics guys - for some reason blogger is not recognizing my hard returns (even when I hard code them in HTML)...hope to have it fixed for the next blog! But for now the only way to break up my paragraphs is with pics :-)