Decentering Calorie Counting in Recovery

Earlier this week I saw a little girl at the check out, probably 9 or 10, doing something that made me pause. She picked up a candy bar, quickly flipped it over, and shook her head putting it back. Shoulders slumped, she walked back to her mom. Of course, she could have been checking for something she was allergic to. But this behavior made me feel unsettled; disappointed that a child that young would be so preoccupied with the calories, macronutrients, or ingredients in a piece of candy. Based on her body language, someone in her life had told her that there was a certain way to eat and behave around food. There was something about the way she looked at the candy that reminded me how early we can learn to understand and quantify food through numbers.

The research on children’s relationships with food and their bodies is concerning. In the age of social media and crash diets, children and teens are receiving messages about what they should think earlier and earlier. According to NEDA, Studies have shown that about 50% of preadolescent girls and 30% of preadolescent boys dislike their body, reflecting how early fear and stigma around body size can become normalized (Alleva, J. M., Sheeran, P. & Webb, T. L., 2015). That fear can manifest in dieting behaviors: 46% of 9-11-year-olds reported being “sometimes” or “very often” on diets, while 82% of their families reported dieting at least sometimes (Gustafson-Larson & Terry, 1992). By adulthood, these behaviors can become so normalized that they barely register as unusual. Both of these studies are more than a decade old, but they paint a clear picture of the relationship between body dissatisfaction and exposure to dieting. More recently, in 2022, a survey found that 32% of U.S. consumers reported counting calories (Nguyen, 2022). When children repeatedly see food and bodies framed as things to measure and regulate, disordered behaviors like calorie counting are more normalized and socially integrated. 

I know this because my own experience with calorie counting started when I was 9. An adult in my life had me drink Gatorade and then had me run to “burn off” the calories. I already had a tenuous relationship with food and my body, but this gave me a new method to monitor it– further unraveling my ability to eat intuitively and listen to my body. To be clear, singular moments, like checking the amount of fat in a candy bar or being introduced to compensatory movement, do not cause eating disorders. Though disordered interactions with food lay the foundation for them. What concerned me about the little girl at the checkout was not the possibility that she had looked at a nutrition label, but the larger cultural context that can teach children and teens that food is something to quantify before deciding whether they are allowed to eat it.

Part of what makes calorie and macronutrient counting so difficult to leave behind is that, after enough repetition, it stops feeling voluntary. The calculations can feel like they are embedded in your brain. Almost reflexively, the numbers just appear. Research on habits in anorexia nervosa suggests how behaviors that are repeated frequently can become increasingly automatic and tied to specific cues, requiring less conscious oversight. What begins as a deliberate behavior can gradually become a habitual response. (Uniacke et al., 2018). In that sense, calorie counting can become a learned response to food. In my own experience, I have stopped logging my intake, stopped seeking out specific nutrition information, and stopped overanalyzing the calculation. But, food can still come with a number attached to it long after deciding that the number no longer matters. 

For those of us with a history of calorie/macronutrient counting, the numbers might still surface automatically—not because you want them to, but because your brain has learned to associate food with calculation. When we acknowledge this part of recovery, recovery becomes a practice of teaching your brain that the numbers no longer carry the same power. Instead, we can treat these thoughts as data, notice them without moralizing or judging, and use that awareness to make the next right decision for ourselves rather than letting the numbers make it for us. 

Decentering calorie and macronutrient counting requires getting curious about why we, as a culture, see food through that lens in the first place. It requires questioning the ways we are taught to understand food, explaining why those messages can harm at risk populations, and reframing what nutrition and wellness can look like without numbers at the center. We can question conversations about “burning off” food, social media content that presents restriction as health, and the use of apps to monitor intake. We can explain to our friends why these practices are not isolated, especially for people vulnerable to disordered eating, and recognize how easily numbers can become rules. Finally, we can reframe food as something more expansive than calories or macronutrients: culture, connection, energy, and something we are allowed to enjoy without earning it first. 

I still think about that little girl at the checkout. I don't know what she was looking for on that label. What stayed with me was how familiar the moment felt. As I continue to decenter quantifying my food in my recovery, I see bits of my own journey in every young child who has grappled with the nutrition label on the back of a candy bar, and I hope to be a part of a future where joy is placed above restriction. 

Alleva, J. M., Sheeran, P., Webb, T. L., Martijn, C., & Miles, E. (2015). A Meta-Analytic Review of Stand-Alone Interventions to Improve Body Image. PloS one, 10(9), e0139177. https://doi.org/10.1371/journal.pone.0139177

Gustafson-Larson, A. M., & Terry, R. D. (1992). Weight-related behaviors and concerns of fourth-grade children. Journal of the American Dietetic Association, 92(7), 818–822. PMID: 1624650.

Nguyen, H. (2022, August 1). Global: Do consumers care about counting calories? YouGov. https://yougov.com/articles/43303-global-consumers-care-about-counting-calories-poll

Uniacke, B., Walsh, B. T., Foerde, K., & Steinglass, J. E. (2018). The role of habits in anorexia nervosa: Where we are and where to go from here? Current Psychiatry Reports, 20(8), 61. https://doi.org/10.1007/s11920-018-0928-5