3421: All the Important Things a Scale Can’t Measure by Shannon McDonald with Tiny Buddha on Holistic Health

Optimal Health Daily - Fitness and Nutrition

Optimal Living Daily LLC

Nutrition, Fitness, Health & Fitness

4.5 • 677 Ratings

🗓️ 6 June 2026

⏱️ 8 minutes

🔗️ Recording | iTunes | RSS

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Summary

Discover all of the podcasts in our network, search for specific episodes, get the Optimal Living Daily workbook, and learn more at: OLDPodcast.com. Episode 3421: Shannon McDonald reflects on years of allowing a bathroom scale to determine her self-worth, only to discover that strength, resilience, energy, and capability are far more meaningful measures of health. Drawing from her experiences as a runner, mother, nurse practitioner, and strength trainer, she challenges the cultural obsession with being smaller and offers a powerful reminder that our bodies are meant to be strong, healthy, and capable. Read along with the original article(s) here: https://tinybuddha.com/blog/all-the-important-things-a-scale-cant-measure/ Quotes to ponder: "The scale. Those dreaded words and those dreaded numbers. It can strike fear in the heart of any generally happy human." "Our bodies are meant to be strong, healthy, and capable. Strength is something we build, not something we shrink ourselves into." "People would complement the weight loss, not realizing that I was often starving and exhausted. I felt terrible, but the number on the scale was good." Episode references: Body Mass Index (BMI): https://www.cdc.gov/bmi/ Seventeen Magazine: https://www.seventeen.com/ Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

Transcript

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0:00.0	This is Optimal Health Daily.
0:03.0	All the important things a scale can't measure by Shannon MacDonald with tinybuda.com,
0:08.8	and I'm Dr. Neal, your very own personal narrator.
0:12.1	Hey there, happy Saturday, and welcome back to Optimal Health Daily, or O.D,
0:17.0	where I act as your narrator of popular health and fitness blogs,
0:20.4	and always with a bit of my commentary at the end.
0:23.1	Now, we have a bunch of shows covering different topics.
0:26.1	Just search for optimal living daily in any podcast app to find them.
0:30.7	And with that, let's get right to today's post
0:33.1	and start optimizing your life.
0:39.1	All the important things a scale can't measure by Shannon MacDonald with tinybuda.com
0:45.1	The scale
0:47.1	Those dreaded words and those dreaded numbers.
0:50.7	It can strike fear in the heart of any generally happy human.
0:57.0	We look at guidelines and body mass index charts and always think, it should be lower. Have you ever been having a perfectly good
1:03.0	day and suddenly think, maybe I should weigh myself? And just like that, your day is ruined.
1:09.8	How do we let a $20 bathroom scale dictate how we feel about
1:13.4	ourselves? I remember stepping on the scale and seeing numbers that somehow determined how I valued myself.
1:20.1	What a ridiculous way to measure our worth. Yet so many of us do it. Somewhere along the way,
1:26.1	we start believing that if we weigh less, we somehow are more.
1:30.6	I grew up in the 90s, and I remember being told that I should weigh 120 pounds. Thank you,
1:36.8	popular magazines and the fashion industry. Granted, I'm not tall, but that number became something
	...

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