How To Overcome An Emotional Eating Disorder
Do you find yourself reaching for food whenever you feel stressed, sad or even bored? Are you eating to numb your emotions or 'cheer yourself up'? If so, you're not alone as many people comfort eat or engage in 'emotional eating'.
Here's the thing: It's not even necessarily a problem if this is just one of many ways for you to deal with difficult emotions - once in a while won't harm your health and gaining joy from food is not a crime! Emotional eating is only really problematic if it becomes your only coping mechanism, like an automatic response to life stressors difficult emotions.
A lot of people think of emotional eating as an eating problem and therefore try to 'fix it' by dieting or restricting food intake. This approach, however, is more likely to exacerbate emotional eating further or lead to binge eating patterns. The mistake people are making is by treating emotional eating as an eating problem.
Emotional Eating is not an eating problem
'Comfort eating' is not really about food, and it's not an eating problem as such. Instead, it's a self-care and emotional well-being issue. Emotional eating has a lot in common with other maladaptive coping mechanisms, for example, heavy drinking and drug use, in that foods are being used to numb or 'patch' a difficult emotion. For the individual at that particular moment in time, the act of eating becomes an avoidance tactic for feeling an unpleasant emotion.
The obvious issue here is that while a drug user or alcoholic can potentially cut the substance out of their life entirely, whereas individuals struggling with emotional eating will still have to eat on a regular basis. The solution, therefore, is not to remove the 'substance', that being food, but to treat the cause of the emotional eating in the first place.
The psychology of comfort foods
Our thoughts and feelings about food only factor in for one aspect of emotional eating: when it comes to choosing which foods offer us the most comfort.
It's likely that you find yourself reaching for sweet snacks, cheese and high-fat foods, and chances are these are foods that you try to limit or restrict in some way and label as 'bad foods'. They may have even been foods used as 'treats' or 'rewards' in childhood, which has taught you that have to be deserving of them, usually after doing or achieving something challenging. This would explain why you feel you 'deserve' a pint of ice cream after delivering a stressful presentation at work. You may have been placated with particular foods when upset as a child - for example being bribed with chocolate to stop a tantrum, leading you to reach for chocolate when you're feeling sad or angry as an adult.
The concern here is how you address your emotions, not what you eat!
In order to overcome emotional eating, it's crucial to recognise your emotional eating behaviours as a cue to address your emotional well-being, instead of attempting to restrict foods. Remember: restricting food would be an attempt to treat the symptom, rather than the cause, i.e. your emotions.
You can find out more about emotional eating inside my coaching app.
This ultimate bundle is made up of 5 amazing digital workbooks for you to complete digitally using your computer, or print off, pop in a binder and work through at your own pace.
It's like having your own health coach at your fingertips, only it costs less than the average price of one coaching session!
The workbooks included:
WORKBOOK ONE: STRESS & ANXIETY
This workbook is for you if you feel like you're overwhelmed with life's worries and responsibilities. Stress is likely to be affecting your health, happiness, and your work and personal life.
By the end of this workbook you will:
• Recognise the symptoms of anxiety and depression
• Learn how to manage thoughts of worry, catastrophic thinking and negative thought patterns.
• Learn how breathing exercises can relieve the symptoms of stress and immediately calm you down.
• Learn how using SCRUM methodology can make managing your work and business significantly less stressful and more productive.
• Put in place highly effective morning and evening routines, tailed to your lifestyle.
• Bring joy, passion and creativity back into your life and find your sense of purpose.
• Reduce feelings of isolation, put less pressure on your romantic connections and rekindle your social life in a way that fits around your life's responsibilities and interests.
• Put in place lifestyle habits which will support your calm mindset and improve your overall health.
WORKBOOK TWO: BODY IMAGE //Expanded Edition//
This printable workbook is designed to help you move from a place of hating your body, to a place of respecting and accepting your body, while also recognizing that you are so much more than your appearance. After completing the coaching exercises your body image will no longer hold you back from the parts of life you've been missing out on.
This 37-page workbook is split into three parts:
1. Body Neutrality - Shifting your focus away from your physical appearance and onto the other parts of what makes you, you.
2. Body Acceptance – Learning how to show your body respect and compassion and reach a place of peaceful acceptance with it.
3. Body Confidence – Reaching the stage where we don’t let our appearance or, more accurately, the thoughts we have about our appearance hold us back from enjoying the life we want.
WORKBOOK THREE: EMOTIONAL EATING
This workbook is packed with coaching exercises based on Cognitive Behavioural Therapy (CBT) to help you better understand the causes of emotional eating and put in place effective alternative, more effective coping strategies for difficult emotions.
This workbook is split into three parts:
1. Understanding Emotional Eating
2. Developing Emotional Awareness
3. Developing Coping Strategies for Difficult Emotions
My approach to Emotional Eating is ‘Anti-Diet’, which means I do not view emotional eating as an ‘eating problem’. Research shows that responding to emotional eating by restricting food intake increases the risk of binge eating and so this is something I strongly advise against when working to overcome emotional eating.
Instead, the focus throughout this workbook will be to become more emotionally aware that we can accurately label our emotions, identify our underlying needs and meet them effectively.
By taking the time to work through the 43 pages of this workbook, you will:
• Understand why dieting or food restriction is NOT a solution to emotional eating (and why it exacerbates it)
• Understand why you comfort eat and how it's benefiting you (yes, really)
• Increase your emotional awareness - you'll be able to accurately label what you're feeling and identify the cause of it
• Develop effective, alternative coping strategies for coping with strong emotions
WORKBOOK FOUR: PEACEFUL EATING
The Printable Intuitive Eating Workbook for people who want to leave diets behind once and for all and embrace Intuitive Eating instead.
The workbook is split into three parts:
1. Developing Body Awareness – these exercises are designed to help you check in with your body’s signals, including your hunger and fullness cues.
2. Unconditional Permission to Eat – these exercises will help you understand and ditch the food rules you’ve adopted from past diets and diet culture.
3.Mindful Eating – these final exercises will help you find enjoyment and satisfaction from food and listen out for pesky thoughts of diets creeping back into your mind.
WORKBOOK FIVE: HEALTH BEYOND THE SCALE
In this workbook, we will be taking steps to improve our physical health, without focusing on weight. The truth is, we can only truly focus on our health, both physical and psychological once we have totally removed ourselves from diet culture and the dieting mindset.
Throughout this workbook, I want you to keep in mind that our health is important, but that it is also not a measure of our self-worth. It does not define us as people, as we are not ‘bad’ people when we become ill or if we have health issues.
This workbook is split into three parts:
• Part 1 - Joyful movement, where we will look at how to add pleasurable forms of movement into our lives and working through the barriers and issues we may have around exercise.
• Part 2 - Gentle nutrition, where we will look at the physical effect’s food has on us, some general nutritional guidelines (not rules!), and why calories and portion sizes are irrelevant. We will also discuss what we mean by the term ‘play-food’ and the value of ‘play-food’.
• Part 3 - Alternative ways to assess health, where we will look at biomarkers such as blood pressure, blood glucose, and blood cholesterol. All of these are far more useful in diagnosing, managing, and preventing common lifestyle illness, than simply stepping on a bathroom scale.
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PRINTING TIPS:
This workbook contains a mix of portrait and landscape pages. Please select 'Auto portrait/landscape'
when printing.
You can also print on both sides to save paper.
Follow me on Instagram & Facebook: @beyondthebathroomscale
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ABOUT THE CREATOR
Karen Lynne Oliver, BA, MA, is the founder of Beyond The Bathroom Scale®, a hub of self-help resources to aid with recovery from disordered eating and body image.
A former Social Worker, Karen holds a bachelor’s degree in Sociology, specialising in health and society and a master’s degree in Social Work. She has trained in counselling skills and psychotherapy-based approaches including Cognitive Behavioural Therapy (CBT), Dialectical Behavioural Therapy (DBT) and Motivational Interviewing (MI).
Karen has previously written HuffPost UK and has been featured in The Metro, Cambridge Independent and Cosmopolitan Magazine.
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NOT LICENSED FOR PROFESSIONAL USE
To obtain professional use license, please purchase the workbooks using this link: https://beyondthebathroomscale.co.uk/therapy-workbooks/p/body-image-disordered-eating-cbt-workbooks-digitally-fillable-and-printable-for-professional-use-health-coach-therapist-pt
© Copyright 2020 Beyond The Bathroom Scale® – All Rights Reserved.
"Beyond The Bathroom Scale" is a Registered UK Trademark and the intellectual property of the website owner, Karen Oliver, trading as Beyond The Bathroom Scale, part of Lynne Media ('our', 'we', 'us').
We take the protection of our intellectual property very seriously. If we discover that you have breached the terms of the license, we may bring legal proceedings against you and seek monetary damages and/or an injunction to stop you using our materials. You could also be ordered to pay our legal costs.
“I hate my body, I hate being seen in swimwear on holiday and I avoid exercising in public. I don’t feel comfortable in anything I wear. I have clothes in my wardrobe which I’m hoping to slim into… they’ve been there for 15 years. I usually wear something baggy to cover up my body.”
Does this sound like you?
This coaching workbook is designed to help you move from a place of hating your body, to a place of respecting and accepting your body, while also recognising that you are so much more than your appearance.
After completing the coaching exercises your body image will no longer hold you back from the parts of life you've been missing out on.
This workbook is split into three parts of coaching exercises:
1. Body Neutrality - Shifting your focus away from your physical appearance and onto the other parts of what makes you, you.
2. Body Acceptance – Learning how to show your body respect and compassion and reach a place of peaceful acceptance with it.
3. Body Confidence – Reaching the stage where we don’t let our appearance or, more accurately, the thoughts we have about our appearance, hold us back from enjoying the life we want.
//UPDATED - June 2021 // My bestselling workbook has now been expanded to include more coaching exercises and information to help you heal your body image!
_____________________________________________________________________
**No Printer? No problem!**
Your purchase is a digitally fillable pdf, which you can complete using your computer :)
_____________________________________________________________________
About the Author & Store Owner:
Karen Lynne Oliver, BA, MA, is the Founder of Beyond The Bathroom Scale®, a hub of self-help resources to aid with recovery from disordered eating and body image. Karen is also the Programme Director of The Health Mindset Programme™, a 6-month online self-help programme for anyone who wants to improve their body image and relationship with food.
Karen has had articles published in on HuffPost UK and has been featured in The Metro and Cosmopolitan Magazine. Her award-winning blog and coaching programme is based on the Health at Every Size ® approach to health and draws on the principals of Intuitive Eating, the Body Positivity movement, Motivational Interviewing (MI), Positive Psychology and Dialectical Behaviour Therapy (DBT), in order to help busy women tackle disordered eating, overcome emotional eating and recover from long-term dieting via a holistic, research-led online coaching programme.
A former Social Worker, Karen comes from an academic background of Psychology and Sociology. She holds a bachelor’s degree in Sociology, specialising in health and society and a master’s degree in Social Work. She has trained in Counselling skills and Psychotherapy-based approaches such as CBT, DBT and Motivational Interviewing.
______________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________
NOT LICENSED FOR PROFESSIONAL USE
To obtain a professional use license, please purchase the workbooks using this link: https://www.etsy.com/uk/listing/850608675/body-image-disordered-eating-cbt
© Copyright 2020 Beyond The Bathroom Scale® – All Rights Reserved.
"Beyond The Bathroom Scale" is a Registered UK Trademark and the intellectual property of the website owner, Karen Oliver, trading as Beyond The Bathroom Scale, part of Lynne Media ('our', 'we', 'us').
We take the protection of our intellectual property very seriously. If we discover that you have breached the terms of the license, we may bring legal proceedings against you and seek monetary damages and/or an injunction to stop you using our materials. You could also be ordered to pay our legal costs.
"I eat my feelings, I just can't help myself. I come home after a long stressful shift and I work nights sometimes so I often skip meals. I'm just so tired and stressed when I come home but I know that crisps, chocolate and wine are waiting for me. In the moment I feel better.. but the guilt kicks in afterwards."
Does this sound like you?
Many people struggle with emotional eating or 'comfort eating' and use food as a self-soothing mechanism for strong emotions.
The difficulty with emotional eating, is that our society shames people for comfort eating, and then pushes them towards dieting or restricting food in an attempt to curb food intake or counter-act emotional eating. This approach actually exacerbates it and often leads to further eating problems (like binge eating disorder, for example).
The approach we take in this Workbook (and the exact approach I use with my coaching clients) is to first increase your emotional awareness through mindfulness and meditation and then help you understand the purpose of even the most negative emotions you feel. We then look at how to build alternative coping strategies to meet your emotional needs and finish off by setting life goals instead of weight-based goals.
In taking this approach, you will no longer feel shamed for comfort eating, or destroy your relationship with food further by dieting. Instead you will feel free of food anxiety, empowered to meet your emotional needs and able to take control of your life path.
_________________________________________________________________________
This workbook is packed with coaching exercises based on Cognitive Behavioural Therapy (CBT) to help you better understand the causes of emotional eating and put in place effective alternative, more effective coping strategies for difficult emotions.
This workbook is split into three parts:
1. Understanding Emotional Eating
2. Developing Emotional Awareness
3. Developing Coping Strategies for Difficult Emotions
My approach to Emotional Eating is ‘Anti-Diet’, which means I do not view emotional eating as an ‘eating problem’. Research shows that responding to emotional eating by restricting food intake increases the risk of binge eating and so this is something I strongly advise against when working to overcome emotional eating.
Instead, the focus throughout this workbook will be to become more emotionally aware that we can accurately label our emotions, identify our underlying needs and meet them effectively.
By taking the time to work through the 43 pages of this workbook you will:
--> Understand why dieting or food restriction is NOT a solution to emotional eating (and why it exacerbates it)
--> Understand why you comfort eat and how it's benefiting you (yes, really)
--> Increase your emotional awareness - you'll be able to accurately label what you're feeling and identify the cause of it
--> Develop effective, alternative coping strategies for coping with strong emotions
This workbook is packed with useful ‘cheat sheets’ and worksheets.
___________________________________________________________________________________
TIPS:
This workbook contains a mix of portrait and landscape pages. Please select 'Auto portrait/landscape'
when printing.
You can also print on both sides to save paper.
**No Printer? No problem!**
Your purchase is a digitally fillable pdf, which you can complete using your computer :)
____________________________________________________________________________________
ABOUT THE CREATOR:
Karen Lynne Oliver, BA, MA, is the Founder of Beyond The Bathroom Scale®, a hub of self-help resources to aid with recovery from disordered eating and body image. Karen is also the Programme Director of The Health Mindset Programme™, a 6-month online self-help programme for anyone who wants to improve their body image and relationship with food.
Karen has had articles published in on HuffPost UK and has been featured in The Metro and Cosmopolitan Magazine. Her award-winning blog and coaching programme is based on the Health at Every Size ® approach to health and draws on the principals of Intuitive Eating, the Body Positivity movement, Motivational Interviewing (MI), Positive Psychology and Dialectical Behaviour Therapy (DBT), in order to help busy women tackle disordered eating, overcome emotional eating and recover from long-term dieting via a holistic, research-led online coaching programme.
A former Social Worker, Karen comes from an academic background of Psychology and Sociology. She holds a bachelor’s degree in Sociology, specialising in health and society and a master’s degree in Social Work. She has trained in Counselling skills and Psychotherapy-based approaches such as CBT, DBT and Motivational Interviewing.
______________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________
NOT LICENSED FOR PROFESSIONAL USE
To obtain a professional use license, please purchase the workbooks using this link: https://beyondthebathroomscale.co.uk/therapy-workbooks/p/body-image-disordered-eating-cbt-workbooks-digitally-fillable-and-printable-for-professional-use-health-coach-therapist-pt
© Copyright 2020 Beyond The Bathroom Scale® – All Rights Reserved.
"Beyond The Bathroom Scale" is a Registered UK Trademark and the intellectual property of the website owner, Karen Oliver.
We take the protection of our intellectual property very seriously. If we discover that you have breached the terms of the license (as linked to in the footer above), we may bring legal proceedings against you and seek monetary damages and/or an injunction to stop you using our materials. You could also be ordered to pay our legal costs.
“Food is always on my mind. I feel out-of-control around my favourite foods, I always end up binging on them when I finally let myself have them. I worry about calories and macros and track them using an app. I have a long history of dieting which started when I was a teenager. I feel like food probably isn’t this big of a deal for other people, I wish I could relax around it like they seem to.”
Does this sound like you?
The Printable Peaceful Eating Workbook for people who want to leave diets behind once and for all and embrace Intuitive and Mindful Eating instead.
The workbook is split into three parts:
1. Developing Body Awareness – these exercises are designed to help you check in with your body’s signals, including your hunger and fullness cues.
2. Unconditional Permission to Eat – these exercises will help you understand and ditch the food rules you’ve adopted from past diets and diet culture.
3.Mindful Eating – these final exercises will help you find enjoyment and satisfaction from food and listen out for pesky thoughts of diets creeping back into your mind.
This workbook is packed with useful ‘cheat sheets’ and worksheets for you to print and make copies of.
You could create your own binder of self-help resources for your mental wellbeing and personal development and add to them using additional workbooks available on the Lynne Media Etsy Store.
__________________________________________________________________________________________________
TIPS:
This workbook contains a mix of portrait and landscape pages. Please select 'Auto portrait/landscape'
when printing.
You can also print on both sides to save paper.
**No Printer? No problem!**
Your purchase is a digitally fillable pdf, which you can complete using your computer :)
ABOUT THE CREATOR:
Karen Lynne Oliver, BA, MA, is the Founder of Beyond The Bathroom Scale®, a hub of self-help resources to aid with recovery from disordered eating and body image. Karen is also the Programme Director of The Health Mindset Programme™, a 6-month online self-help programme for anyone who wants to improve their body image and relationship with food.
Karen has had articles published in on HuffPost UK and has been featured in The Metro and Cosmopolitan Magazine. Her award-winning blog and coaching programme is based on the Health at Every Size ® approach to health and draws on the principles of Intuitive Eating, the Body Positivity movement, Motivational Interviewing (MI), Positive Psychology and Dialectical Behaviour Therapy (DBT), in order to help busy women tackle disordered eating, overcome emotional eating and recover from long-term dieting via a holistic, research-led online coaching programme.
A former Social Worker, Karen comes from an academic background of Psychology and Sociology. She holds a bachelor’s degree in Sociology, specialising in health and society and a master’s degree in Social Work. She has trained in Counselling skills and Psychotherapy-based approaches such as CBT, DBT and Motivational Interviewing.
______________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________
NOT LICENSED FOR PROFESSIONAL USE
To obtain a professional use license, please purchase the workbooks using this link: https://beyondthebathroomscale.co.uk/therapy-workbooks/p/body-image-disordered-eating-cbt-workbooks-digitally-fillable-and-printable-for-professional-use-health-coach-therapist-pt
© Copyright 2020 Beyond The Bathroom Scale® – All Rights Reserved.
"Beyond The Bathroom Scale" is a Registered UK Trademark and the intellectual property of the website owner, Karen Oliver, trading as Beyond The Bathroom Scale, part of Lynne Media ('our', 'we', 'us').
We take the protection of our intellectual property very seriously. If we discover that you have breached the terms of the license, we may bring legal proceedings against you and seek monetary damages and/or an injunction to stop you using our materials. You could also be ordered to pay our legal costs.
“I’ve been practising Intuitive Eating for awhile. I beginning to feel more at peace with food and my body - but I’m concerned about my health! I want to exercise - not from a place of punishment, but from a place of wanting to care for my body. I also want to improve my nutrition, without slipping back into dieting.”
Does this sound like you?
In this workbook, we will be taking steps to improve our physical health, without focusing on weight. The truth is, we can only truly focus on our health, both physical and psychological once we have totally removed ourselves from diet culture and the dieting mindset.
Throughout this workbook, I want you to keep in mind that our health is important, but that it is also not a measure of our self-worth. It does not define us as people, as we are not ‘bad’ people when we become ill or if we have health issues.
This workbook is split into three parts:
• Part 1 - Joyful movement, where we will look at how to add pleasurable forms of movement into our lives and working through the barriers and issues we may have around exercise.
• Part 2 - Gentle nutrition, where we will look at the physical effect’s food has on us, some general nutritional guidelines (not rules!), and why calories and portion sizes are irrelevant. We will also discuss what we mean by the term ‘play-food’ and the value of ‘play-food’.
• Part 3 - Alternative ways to assess health, where we will look at biomarkers such as blood pressure, blood glucose, and blood cholesterol. All of these are far more useful in diagnosing, managing, and preventing common lifestyle illness, than simply stepping on a bathroom scale.
This workbook is packed with useful ‘cheat sheets’ and worksheets.
______________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________
TIPS:
This workbook contains a mix of portrait and landscape pages. Please select 'Auto portrait/landscape'
when printing.
You can also print on both sides to save paper.
**No Printer? No problem!**
Your purchase includes two versions of the workbook - a printable pdf and a digitally fillable pdf, which you can complete using your computer :)
ABOUT THE CREATOR:
Karen Lynne Oliver, BA, MA, is the Founder of Beyond The Bathroom Scale®, a hub of self-help resources to aid with recovery from disordered eating and body image. Karen is also the Programme Director of The Health Mindset Programme™, a 6-month online self-help programme for anyone who wants to improve their body image and relationship with food.
Karen has had articles published in on HuffPost UK and has been featured in The Metro and Cosmopolitan Magazine. Her award-winning blog and coaching programme is based on the Health at Every Size ® approach to health and draws on the principals of Intuitive Eating, the Body Positivity movement, Motivational Interviewing (MI), Positive Psychology and Dialectical Behaviour Therapy (DBT), in order to help busy women tackle disordered eating, overcome emotional eating and recover from long-term dieting via a holistic, research-led online coaching programme.
A former Social Worker, Karen comes from an academic background of Psychology and Sociology. She holds a bachelor’s degree in Sociology, specialising in health and society and a master’s degree in Social Work. She has trained in Counselling skills and Psychotherapy-based approaches such as CBT, DBT and Motivational Interviewing.
NOT LICENSED FOR PROFESSIONAL USE
To obtain a professional use license, please purchase the workbooks using this link: https://beyondthebathroomscale.co.uk/therapy-workbooks/p/body-image-disordered-eating-cbt-workbooks-digitally-fillable-and-printable-for-professional-use-health-coach-therapist-pt
© Copyright 2020 Beyond The Bathroom Scale® – All Rights Reserved.
"Beyond The Bathroom Scale" is a Registered UK Trademark and the intellectual property of the website owner, Karen Oliver.
We take the protection of our intellectual property very seriously. If we discover that you have breached the terms of the license, we may bring legal proceedings against you and seek monetary damages and/or an injunction to stop you using our materials. You could also be ordered to pay our legal costs.
Karen Lynne Oliver, BA, BSc (Hons), MA, GMBPsS
Karen Lynne Oliver, BA, BSc (Hons), MA, GMBPsS, is the founding director of Beyond The Bathroom Scale ®. She is a former social worker, retraining as a trauma-informed therapist specialising in eating disorders and body image.
Feel more at home in your body — no matter what stage of your GLP-1 journey you're on.
This beautifully designed digital workbook offers gentle, trauma-informed support for anyone using GLP-1 medications (like Ozempic, Wegovy or Mounjaro) who wants to heal their relationship with food, body image, and self-worth.
Whether you’re new to GLP-1 weight loss injections or further along in your journey, this self-paced workbook meets you exactly where you’re at — with no shame, no food rules, and no pressure to shrink yourself.
💡 What’s Inside:
25+ therapist-informed coaching exercises designed to deepen body awareness and self-compassion
Tools to support your relationship with food, hunger, body image, movement, and emotional eating
Practical activities like the Body Timeline, Food Rule Challenge Ladder, and Weekly Self-Care Rhythm Planner
Trauma-informed prompts, sensory grounding practices, and boundary-setting support
A discount code for the full online course (exclusive to workbook buyers!)
Instant digital download — fill in digitally or print at home
🎯 This workbook is for you if:
You feel disconnected from hunger or fullness while on GLP-1 medication
You’re ready to stop obsessing over numbers and start redefining true health
You want to unlearn diet culture and reconnect with your body in a safe, supported way
You’re looking for coaching-style guidance that honours your emotional and physical needs
You’re not quite ready for the full course, or want a more affordable entry point
📥 Format:
PDF digital workbook (fillable + printable)
Immediate download after purchase
For personal use only
🧠 Created by:
Karen Lynne Oliver
Therapist-in-training | Eating Psychology Coach | Founder of Beyond the Bathroom Scale®