The Trouble with Tracking
The post in which I weigh & measure (ha!) the benefits & pitfalls of all of the various ways I've tried tracking my food intake over the years, including not tracking.
The first time I remember tracking my food intake, it was the late 80’s, and I was 12 years old and probably 115-120 pounds. My mother brought me to an in-person weigh-in/meeting format called Diet Workshop, very similar to Weight Watchers. Yes, yes, I am also shocked and disappointed that my very own mother would bring a healthy weight pre-teen girl to a weight loss clinic, but that was then, and that was her.
I don’t remember the specific tracking mechanism, but I do remember suddenly only eating what people in the 80’s thought of as diet food — Cottage cheese, Tab, carrot sticks — and being hungry all the time.
Since then, I’ve done it all. Richard Simmons’ had Deal a Meal cards and the Food Mover with their little windows that you’d open & shut to visualize what you’ve eaten and what you get to still eat. Counting Points on Weight Watchers was of course the old standby, including all of the many iterations this program took over the years. This is where I learned that if you add enough Fiber One to whatever junk food you were eating, you could in essence lower the point value (spoiler alert: that’s not how this works, that’s now how any of this works.) I was in heaven for the first few days on the Atkins diet where I only had to limit my carbs, and everything else was up for grabs. Eating nothing but bacon and cheese loses its appeal pretty quickly though (also, I’m pretty sure that approach was never Dr. Atkins’ intention.) I also did programs like Jenny Craig where tracking wasn’t necessary, as long as you ate their prepackaged meals.
The most disciplined I ever was was when I was “abstinent” in Overeaters Anonymous. My food plan was given to me by a sponsor, and for reasons that are still beyond my comprehension, I ate this way for 16 months, losing 110 pounds in the process. I weighed & measured everything I ate. I committed my food to my sponsor the night before or the morning of, and I didn’t deviate from what I planned to eat. One year I went on a week-long vacation and I packed a cooler full of weighed & measured meals and snacks for all 7 days. I was congratulated for being so disciplined and “good”, but I look back now and feel like that may have been the height of my disordered eating. I was so scared of gaining weight that I had to control every possible food-situation for the entirety of my vacation. This was no vacation, friends. It was hell in an Igloo cooler.
The Rebound
As I mentioned in my last post, the root cause of compulsive overeating is actually restriction, and man oh man, isn’t it just wacky that every diet is based on restriction in some way. I spent an entire decade after leaving OA not tracking or weighing or measuring. With that freedom came weight gain, but over time I also gained body trust, a sense of my own hunger & fullness levels, and fine tuned my inner intuitive eater. It did not happen overnight, it really was about 10 years of trial and error, mostly error. I had to do a lot of internal work on shame, self-acceptance, body neutrality, etc. and unlearning a lot of behaviors that were ingrained by coming of age in the 90’s when Susan Powter was telling us to STOP THE INSANITY and eat volumes of carbs as long as there was no fat in sight.
Not tracking became so normal that I found it jarring to come across someone looking at a nutrition label and deciding that whatever they were looking at was “not worth the calories”. It was as if a lifetime of counting and tracking and judging had never happened to me, and I found it peculiar as hell that someone who may be interested in eating something would consult numerical data about that food in order to make a decision whether to eat it or not. Like, was I even witnessing a human being right now? It just seemed bonkers crazy pants that people would base a decision about consumption on data processed by the brain, and not on signals from their own body.
As I learned more about perimenopause, muscle loss, and aging with dignity, I started to read more about nutrition. I would have avoided these articles in the past because I either knew it all already, or I was purposely avoiding any triggering behavior that would spring out of reading something about what I should do. When I focused on learning for the sake of overall health & well-being and not about weight-loss, something in me shifted. I suddenly understood why reading nutrition labels was helpful. Not everything was based in restriction with a weight-loss goal. I was so conditioned after decades of weight-loss attempts that I forgot that health is important on its own. And then I thought that it would be bonkers crazy pants to make consumption decisions on body signals alone and NOT consider the nutritional information.
The Perfectly Imperfect
Where I’m at now is complicated. I am working with a nutritionist to help me become healthier, and we’ve talked a lot about how I do not want weight loss to be the goal, even though we both know that is totally the goal, if only as a side effect. It’s nice to not really focus on that though. She has me track my food and I was very resistant at first, but have gotten used to it, even though I have feelings about the fact that I have gotten used to it (ha!). Here is one major mental shift that has helped me differentiate my new habits from my old, toxic habits:
THEN: I used to have a number in mind when weighing foods, meaning I knew how much I was “allowed”. I would put the food on the scale and literally slice or skim or sprinkle my way to the exact measurement. I used to be so exact with it that I would weigh the empty bowl with the spoon, so that any amount of food on the spoon would also be included in the weighed amount.
NOW: I put the amount of food on the scale that looks like a satisfying amount, and then I look to see how much it weighs. That’s what I put into my tracker. My body decides how much and when to eat, but my brain still gets the benefit of processing the data after the fact. I can ask myself, do I feel satisifed after that meal? If the answer is yes, I can look at the data and be like, “oh cool, I guess 6 ounces of steak was a satisfying amount for me for today.”
In a perfect world, I would be completely in tune with my nutritional needs. I’d eat when hungry, and stop when full. I would crave the vitamins and nutrients that my body was deficient in. This sort of perfect world does not exist. I can use both body and brain, and be mindful of both hunger AND nutritional information. I can exist in the grey and not have to count points nor days of abstinence. Perfectly imperfect is the best I can do, and I’m ok with that.