Bad Habit: Counting Calories

Don't you love unrelated pictures for blog posts?

Earlier this week, two articles came across my radar about calorie counting and how it is a bad idea. The timing was fortuitous and serendipitous, as the prior few weeks had seen me drifting back into the partner bad habits of counting calories and weighing myself daily.

It is guaranteed that if I start weighing myself every morning and tracking caloric burn vs. intake, sooner or later I will overeat. I'm not saying there's a causal relationship--the habits are outward manifestations of an incorrect mindset--but they add to my anxiety about weight and feed the problem.

Here's what I took away from the two articles:

A. Weenies like to count things. Pounds, calories, watts, whatever. You can't count good habits or character. Those things count for more in the long term AND short term. Don't be a weenie.

B. Simple, not easy: making good choices are easy but sometimes there is a lot of opposition, both internal (habits and their triggers) and external (stress, social situations). If I can consistently pay attention to the following and improve each I can make my nutritional choices virtuous ones:

--sugar

--bad habits and their triggers

--stress

That means reducing sugar, reducing stress, and figuring out my bad habits and taking steps to replace them with good habits. Perfect example: diet soda. I drink too much. What are my triggers? I'll have to start thinking about that. Stay tuned.

1. (Most Important) Calorie counting severs the mind body connection. Listening to my body is replaced by a rule, and the rule is, I must not eat above x number of calories. If I stop listening to my body, I am not taking good care of it.

2. It causes guilt. I start telling myself that I can't or shouldn't eat this food since it has a lot of calories. As you've probably experienced, humans tend to want what they can't have. The more I deny myself a food or food group, the more I want it, and the greater the guilt I feel when eventually I end up eating it. Unfortunately, when I do end up eating it, its way too much! And I feel really bad.

3. It doesn't allow me to enjoy food. Instead of savoring the tasty food, I am just worried about how much of it I can eat. It's even worse if there are no "Nutrition Facts" for the food so it becomes a guessing game and my mind runs away with itself, worrying about just how many calories I am eating.

Don't mind the irregular numbering system but do mind the take away lesson. Don't count calories! It's important for me to have a sense of what 500, 1000, 2000 calories looks like so that I'm nourishing myself but working on my character and habits is a far better way to develop my ideal self (inside and outside) than stressing about calories.