Consumed by calories
I’m never more aware of the caloric content of food than when I am in the United States of America. It baffles me how I was able to progress so far in recovery in a land where calorie counts are EVERY. WHERE.
Sides of boxes, backs of bags, alongside dish descriptions on menus, and seemingly in a MUCH larger font than I remember, while the rest of the nutritional facts—especially the list of ingredients—are microscopic afterthoughts.
As other posts on RW have attested, I’ve recently moved back to the U.S. after nearly 8 years abroad. While overseas, I didn’t make an effort to learn the conversion rate between EU and U.S. units of nutritional data. I didn’t care to translate lists of ingredients into English. And I also wasn’t as accosted with such information as I am in the States.
In my abbreviated absence, calorie counts seem to have gotten bigger, bolder, and now appear in unexpected places. You’re reading the description of a dish on a restaurant menu, saliva starting to form on your tongue when a two- to four-digit number at the end of the text whiplashes you back to a state of indecision.
For people who fixate on daily food intake, this number has the power to either trigger a rush of serotonin by falling within what you may consider an acceptable amount of calories, OR force you to keep browsing the menu for something more calorie-friendly, potentially depriving your body, mind, and taste buds of what you really want to eat.
Part of my recovery has been accepting the bliss that is ignorance. I no longer know my weight, and I don’t care. I don’t always know the caloric content of every single thing I eat and drink, and also, I don’t care. The dependency I used to place on my nightly ritual of recording the number of calories I consumed and expelled each day robbed me of actually enjoying food for the sensorial pleasure it can provide and savoring memory-building moments while dining out with family and friends.
Calorie-counting kept me captive in a dungeon where winning was never within reach—I could always eat fewer calories, I could always exercise more. I could always “improve” my unhealthy behaviors by heeding the eating disorder’s demands to push myself just to see how far I could take it. But each threshold I passed only made me more dependent on staying within whatever new set of limits I set for myself, continually depleting my body of what it needed to perform basic bodily functions (i.e., keep me alive).
If dieting really worked, we would have a solution by now.
While I understand that some people benefit from the blaring display of make-or-break data, we have to ask ourselves whether these numbers are really serving us, whether the attention and dedication people devote to calorie-dependent eating plans (a.k.a. “diets”) are doing more harm than good. The act of setting limits in and of itself is straight-up deprivation, and decades of failed diet trends and fads have proven that our minds (almost more than our bodies) don’t do well with deprivation.
They say numbers don’t lie, but I say numbers don’t matter.
When we’re able to see beyond the calories and the grams and the pounds, when we’re able to listen to what our bodies need, what makes them feel good and what makes them feel not so good, when we’re really able to slow down, sit with our thoughts (most importantly the uncomfortable ones), and distinguish between what might be emotional hunger versus true, physical hunger, our bodies will actually tell us what they need. We don’t need to be told what we can and can’t eat by a cardboard box.
Pause & Prompt
Grab a pen and finish this sentence:
“I want to be free from (insert a limit caused by your eating disorder or other mental illness) because…”
