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.

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.

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.