What happened when I stopped counting calories
*Trigger warning: This post includes details about calorie counting (no numbers).
In case it’s not clear from the title of this post, I used to count calories.
Religiously.
I won’t go into too many details in order to protect the recovery of others, but in short, the lower the number of calories I consumed each day, the better my day was.
I thought about food all the time, every second of the day—what I would eat, what I had eaten, and what I would allow myself to eat for the rest of the day.
It was all-consuming. There was no room in my life (or my brain) for anything else.
Until one day when I thought to myself, “What am I doing?”
It would be an understatement to say my life at that time was a tad tumultuous.
But I eventually realized, after a series of physical symptoms of severe calorie restriction, that my body couldn’t sustain this. That my life couldn’t sustain this. I had to change.
With the support of a treatment team, I tossed my scale (more on this in a future post) and I tried my best to be as ignorant as possible about the calorie content in what I was eating.
But as we know, especially in the United States, calorie counts are everywhere.
Ignoring calories isn’t easy in a country where these days they’re splashed across menus, written in big bold letters on the sides of milk cartons and boxes of cereal, and even shouted to us from our TV. Some restaurants have entire menus dedicated to keeping a diner’s meal under a certain number of calories. Marketing has made us feel that these numbers are not only important but also crucial in warding off the ever-dreaded myth of obesity.
Attempting to discount these numbers didn’t (and couldn’t) happen overnight. It took years.
But here are a few ways my life has improved since I stopped counting calories.
I have more time in my day.
Without concerning myself with the caloric content of my food (which, by the way, isn’t even an accurate portrayal of the exact energy make-up of our food), my mind and schedule are free to fill with whatever I want.
I’m more present at mealtime.
Instead of caring about how many calories are in my meals or how I’m going to burn them off, I now can experience the joy of eating, including the taste, texture, smell, and satisfaction the sensory experience of eating can provide us.
Now, instead of clamoring for the moment when I “get to” eat my next meal, I’m able to focus on other parts of life and eat when my body tells me it’s hungry. It takes time to build trust between your recovering mind and your recovering body in terms of hunger signals, but as you start to trust your body to do its job, you’ll notice it’s pretty good at it.
Do I still see calories? Yes, they’re everywhere. They’re almost impossible to avoid. Every so often, my eyes scan across the bold black numbers. But the difference is that now, these numbers don’t mean anything to me.
Their existence is pointless, which is how my eating disorder used to make me feel about myself. But I forget these numbers the second after I see them, and they never reenter my subconscious.
They no longer hold power over me, my body, and my day. They no longer dictate my food choices. They no longer control my life.
They’re no longer a piece of the puzzle that used to be each day, filled with mental calculations of calories in, calories out, which, for someone whose aversion to math was as strong as her desire to be thin, required even more concentration than your typical human brain.
Now, calories are irrelevant. And the freedom that comes with this newfound brain space is something I never thought I would be able to count on.