The Scales Haven't Changed. The Numbers Have.

95 kg and 14 st 13.4 lb are the same weight. Identical. Not close, not roughly equivalent — the same.

They don’t feel the same to me at all.

I thought that was sentiment for a while. Some leftover attachment to stones and pounds because that’s what I grew up with. Except I’m not actually that attached to imperial anything. I think in metric for pretty much everything else. Miles per hour is the only other place it survives.

So it’s not nostalgia. It’s the numbers themselves.

A kilo is 2.2 lb. Lose one, and the kg figure ticks down by a clean 1: 96 to 95. Lose exactly the same amount of me, and the pounds figure drops by 2.2, a bigger digit for identical weight loss. If anything, pounds oversell the change and kilos undersell it. Backwards from what I’d have guessed.

Then there’s the stone boundary, doing its own version of the same trick. 15 st 0 lb to 14 st 13.9 lb is a tenth of a pound. Practically nothing. But the leading number drops from 15 to 14, so it looks like something’s actually happened, when almost nothing has.

The scales haven’t changed what they’re measuring. The units I’m reading it in have just been quietly lying to me about how big the number is.