About a month ago, we needed a new Netflix series to binge on and Aaron suggested we have a look at ‘The Good Place’. I’m so glad he did. It was fucking forking brilliant.

I adored all the characters and one if my favourites was definitely the name-dropping, poor-little-rich-girl Tahani, played by the exquisite Jameela Jamil.

The other day, while trawling through Twitter for Oscars updates, I came across her extraordinary #IWeigh initiative and have become a little obsessed. Jamil started this all with a blog post following a truly horrendous – as in ‘what the fuck fork were they thinking’ horrendous – photo of the women in the Kardashian family with their weights superimposed over the top of them. The photo was shared on an Instagram account claiming to be about ‘fashion, beauty, lifestyle’ which apparently is code for ‘Your-life-is-not-good-enough-you-piece-of-shit.’. Who knew?!

Anyway clearly Jamil was unimpressed by this photo – not only that these poor women had been labelled by their weigh in kilograms, but then there was a discussion afterwards that included posters doubting the truth of the numbers given. Awesome, not only were these women being judged about the number they see on the scales, they were also being called out as liars.

I looked at the photo and I stopped seeing the faces of the Kardahsians (I’ll be honest – I wasn’t all that upset) and started seeing them as bathroom scales. Oh – the insta post got better: it asked followers to share how much they weigh, because that’s a metric that we are ALL comfortable sharing with an Instagram audience. (Hashtag fitspo/thinspo/any-other-damaging-spo.)

Jamil’s impassioned post called out the bullshit and begging that we stop defining a woman’s worth by her weight, posting a photo of how she weighs her worth:

This resulted in a rush on women listing how they ‘weigh’ themselves.

While I think many women could relate to what was going on here, add diabetes to the mix and we have it tenfold! In diabetes, we get judged by more than just our weight. We become defined in the eyes of some HCPs by all the numbers associated with our condition whether it be the snapshot BGL check we do in front of them, our A1c, our blood pressure, our CGM trace or even our time in range. The measure of who we are is in those numbers, as if a number can define who we are.

But just like women cannot be measured by their weight (stop it! No, seriously – stop it!) people with diabetes cannot be measured by any of our numbers. Because of course, we are always, always, always about much more than that average number.

I measure my weight as a person not in kilograms or pounds, but in the things that make me who I am. Some of those things weigh me down, others lighten me. But together, they define me and make me who I am.