Do You NEED to Track Your Food?
I was wrong about the importance of tracking food.
I’m happy to admit that today, and to correct my mistake.
When I began coaching nutrition 6 years ago, I felt certain everyone needed to track their food to lose weight. I thought measuring the calories and macronutrients (protein, carbohydrates, and fat) you put into your body was the best method because it relied on science.
And hey, tracking worked for me when nothing else did, so how could it not be the best way to lose weight?
Don’t get me wrong, if you know what your body needs are, and you’re eating less than that amount, you will lose weight—that’s simply physics—but I no longer believe that relying on tracking as a weight loss tool is beneficial for everyone.
So what changed my mind?
To begin with, knowing what your body needs doesn’t necessarily mean you will eat that amount of food in practice.
Many people have trouble limiting the amount of food they eat when attempting weight loss—the practice familiarly known as “cheating on your diet.”
Similarly, if you’re not trying to lose weight but simply maintain it, it can still be easy to overeat (or undereat for some).
But more importantly, I’ve come to believe that relying on external cues to tell you how much (or how little) you should eat is exacerbating one of the underlying problems leading to weight gain:
Self-disconnection.
Self-disconnection means being out of touch with your feelings, thoughts, expectations, or beliefs. When you’re disconnected from yourself, you’re unable (or unwilling) to hear your own emotional, spiritual, or physical needs, and thus unable to fulfill them.
So how exactly does self-disconnection make it hard to lose or maintain your weight?
Throughout your day, your body gives you a plethora of feedback telling you how you’re feeling, from your emotions to other feeling-states, like how hot or cold you are, whether you’re tired or not, how hungry you are, and so on.
Some people lose the ability to gauge whether they feel physically hungry or not because they stop paying attention to their hunger signals. This could be because they:
Always eat at a certain time regardless of how hungry they are
Dissociate due to unresolved trauma (dissociation is disconnection between a person’s thoughts, memories, feelings, actions or sense of who they are)
Eat frequently due to a fear of feeling hungry
Are accustomed to eating for reasons other than hunger, such as emotional eating, eating when they see food, or eating because others are eating
Additionally, self-disconnection makes processing emotions more difficult because the default reactions to negative emotions include:
Suppressing your feelings by attempting not to think or talk about them
Displacing them onto others by yelling, criticizing, or otherwise lashing out
Seeking distraction, through social media, television, dating apps, exercise, etc.
Smothering them using food, alcohol, drugs or other means of changing your emotional state
Escaping from emotions often deepens self-disconnection if it involves eating highly palatable, calorie-dense foods (aka “junk foods”) which lead to lower satiety and more cravings, and thus overeating.
As well, self-disconnection often leads to low self-worth, low energy, and low self-efficacy, which all contribute to a lack of motivation to engage in health-promoting behaviors such as exercising and getting adequate sleep.
Through the combination of disconnection from emotions and other feeling-states, like hunger, it becomes impossible to listen to your body’s actual needs and take the necessary steps to fulfill those needs.
And that is why I’m so eager to admit that I was wrong about tracking food.
I do still believe that tracking can be a useful tool for some people at some times, but selectively and with the context carefully considered.
So rather than learning to rely on external cues to guide my student’s eating habits and food relationships, I’m teaching my Food Body Self students how to:
Reconnect with themselves and their bodies
Cultivate a healthy relationship with food
And enter a new era:
The Age of Connection.
This blog is Part 3 of a 3-part series on The Age of Connection.
For Part 1, click here: Food is NOT the Root Cause of Overeating
For Part 2, click here: How the Age of Disconnection is Destroying our Communities and Health