The Problem with Eating and Moving by Numbers

A career-coaching question about changing a system led to a proposed shift from numbers-based thinking about healthy eating and movement to instinct-based thinking. Losing instincts by replacing them with numbers is described as central to how eating disorders take hold. Numerical labels, apps, guidelines, and scales can make arbitrary rules feel absolute, even as they evolve over time. A reversal is imagined as burning those numerical tools and using the ashes to regrow intuition, appetite, and bodily self-knowledge. The goal is to free the world from self-made shackles and reduce unreflective, patronizing, and ineffective moralizing driven by quantification.

"Of my work with eating disorders and recovery, my coach asked: If you could make one change in the system, what would it be? And my off-the-cuff answer was: I'd change how we think about healthy eating and movement from numbers-based to instinct-based."

"Losing your instincts by replacing them with numbers is often somewhere close to the centre of how an eating disorder takes hold. (In one early post, for example, I explored the weirdness of how eating-disorder rules that seem at any given moment immovable nonetheless evolve enormously over the years-and how their numerical guises help the arbitrary appear absolute.)"

"So in a simple sense, this imagined magic is a reversal of that, at a global scale: gathering all the labels and apps and guidelines and scales into one enormous bonfire and letting the ashes feed the regrowth of intuition, appetite, and all the other forms of bodily self-knowledge."

"The overuse of quantification often contributes to unreflective, patronizing, and ineffective moralizing. This series explores the damage being done by making everything numerical, and how we could reverse the trend."

Read at Psychology Today