As Simpson noted in the essay, she’s faced public scrutiny, judgment and body shaming over her weight throughout her career. But the moment she decided to throw out the scale came in 2019, when she weighed herself three weeks before she gave birth to her now 3-year-old daughter Birdie.

“I weighed more than my husband, a six-foot-three former tight end in the NFL,” Simpson who also shares daughter Maxwell, 9, and son Ace, 8, with her spouse Eric Johnson, wrote. 

Afterwards, Simpson started to cry. “Here I was, creating life, this miracle baby that we didn’t expect but welcomed because we knew she was exactly who we needed to complete our family,” she continued. “My heart literally beat for hers. I looked down at my belly, which was all I could see back then anyway, then over to the scale. ‘This,’ I said aloud, ‘is not right.'”

So, The Dukes of Hazzard actress took the scale and put it straight in a trash bag. “‘Goodbye,’ I told the scale,” she wrote in the essay. “I don’t care if you’re broken. I’m not.”