Well, 6.6 pounds lighter, to be exact. And it didn’t involve violent illness or amputation.

You wouldn’t know it to look at me, but I weigh myself fairly regularly. Not that any of us really need to do that. Because if the clothes that used to fit don’t fit anymore … we’ve lost weight. Or, far more likely, gained it.

But I was suspicious of the weighing device I was using.

We had picked it up from one of those “everything must go” sales we expats have, here in Abu Dhabi, from time to time. Someone at The National takes a new job, they realize that they have collected a fair amount of “stuff” that they have no intention of taking with them, and someone buys the couch for $200, and someone else buys the TV for $100, and another someone else takes the toaster or microwave for $10 each.

In this case, a Canadian who was returning to Calgary had a “come take my sh*t” party in the spring of 2010. (Her name for it.) She was giving away everything in her place, aside from a few pricey items that she was charging money for. We ended up with Klimt print and a bathroom scale from Ikea. No charge for either one. And a pretty nice, hardwood coffee table for less than 50 bucks.

Till then, I actually had never weighed myself over here. So, the Ikea scale showed up (made in China), and I stepped on that and said, “Holy mackerel, worse than I thought.”

I did notice that the scale tended to move around, when sitting at putative zero. One day the needle would start below zero … a week later it would be above it. I had to adjust the machine a lot. Not a precision piece of equipment.

Then I would bump into a scale in other locales … at a doctor’s office, perhaps, or maybe Paris, and I would seem to weigh a bit less. I tended to chalk it up to “weirdness from being weighed while wearing shoes” or, in France, a strange phenomenon I have noticed in which I actually lose weight while eating well in Paris. Hard to imagine, but there you go.

But then I got back to SoCal during the summer, and at the family house in Long Beach is one of those old-fashioned mechanical scales that doctors used to have. You know, the kind where you move weights along a sliding apparatus … one weight slots into 50, 100, 150, 200 pounds … and the other runs along the individual pounds (and quarter pounds) in between, to determine a precise weight … and I weighed less than I did in Abu Dhabi.

Something clearly was off. I wanted to believe it was the Ikea scale, here in AD which consistently had me higher than I liked to think … but I feared it was the other scales, or just strange things that were tied to being out of the country.

So, I decided we needed a new scale in Abu Dhabi. Which Leah bought at the Lulu Hypermarket. Also made in China, but maybe not quite as cheesy as the Ikea made-in-China scale. It runs on a battery, see; it must be good. Electronic and all.

So, I hooked up the 9-volt battery, closed things up, turned it on with a kick of my foot … and voila. I went 3 kilograms less than I had a few days before. That is, 6.6 pounds.

I’ve had worse news. I still weigh more than I should or would like to, but not quite as much more as I did. It was good news, then. I have 6.6  fewer pounds to lose to get to the weight I would prefer — which is still some serious distance off.

Of course, I feel pretty much the same. My clothes are as tight or loose as they were a month ago.

But for a moment there, it was both fun and a relief to not be as gooey as I thought I was.