For the best part of a year I logged everything I ate into an app. Every meal became a small act of accountancy. I lost a little weight, then put it back, and the only lasting result was a strange anxiety around food.
The trouble with the numbers
Calorie counting treats food as pure arithmetic, as if a hundred calories of almonds and a hundred calories of fizzy drink were the same thing. They are not. One keeps you full and feeds you, the other leaves you hungry an hour later.
The numbers are also wildly imprecise. Labels are allowed a margin of error, your body absorbs different foods differently, and the figure on the packet was never as exact as the app made it feel. I was tracking a number to two decimal places that was honestly a rough guess.
What I pay attention to now
I dropped the app and started noticing simpler things.
- Whether a meal actually fills me up for a few hours
- Whether it is mostly real food rather than packaged stuff
- How I feel an hour later, steady or crashing
- Whether I am eating because I am hungry or just bored
The result
Eating stopped being admin. I think about food less, not more, and I make better choices because I am paying attention to how it makes me feel rather than to a running total. For some people, tracking genuinely helps. For me it turned a pleasure into a spreadsheet, and I am happier without it.