The Problem With Eating and Moving by Numbers
Reclaiming our bodies from the tyranny of measurement culture.
Updated May 28, 2026 | Reviewed by Kaja Perina
Whatever field we work in, things to get annoyed, frustrated, even angry about are probably easily found. It can be good to temper them with the creativity that comes from pretending, for a brief liberated moment, that there are no constraints: that we have a magic wand and a wish to be granted, and no need to be depressed or resentful anymore.
Amongst the many great questions that a recent spell of career coaching involved, one of them did this for me. 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.
It’s a rousing image, to me at least, and it comes from a good-hearted desire to see the world freed of its self-made shackles. It’s also, like most inspirations, a bit more self-centred than that. For whatever set of nature/nurture reasons, I’ve always hated the feeling of being talked down to. And that feeling has grown more or less inescapable in public health initiatives relating to food and exercise—and it’s created primarily via numbers. Lots and lots and lots of them!
They start us young with the patronizing, I suppose because it seems more justified with a 5-year-old than a 50-year-old. But kids are good at spotting when they’re being talked down to, and I’ve mused (in a series on why we need to take the drabness out of healthcare) on what it would mean to give schoolchildren enough credit to let them work out where their own dangers lie and how they want to ward them off—if indeed they want to.
In the long messy document of “blog ideas” that lives on my hard drive, one snippet that encouraged me to start this series now was a New York Times piece by Pete Wells called “Is Loving Food the Secret to Eating Less of It? The case for ditching self- denial and embracing enjoyment.” Introducing an initiative designed to get children interested in veg, Wells writes:
“These kids have never been taught that broccoli or apples or lettuce is something they might enjoy,” Ms. Wilson said. “They have been told, ‘Eat five a day.’ But none of those are things that make someone, least of all a child, want to pick it up and eat it.”
Public health campaigns for eating well seem to fall back on images that haven’t changed much since the 1950s, relying heavily on shiny raw produce that looks rather chaste. Nutrition has never had anything remotely like the ads at the height of the AIDS epidemic that promoted safe sex with images of hot, horny, entwined young people. Instead of fighting pleasure, those campaigns recognized it as a powerful motivator and enlisted it in the cause.
Just as “just say no” has always failed as a health message, “make sure you count” always will too, I think. Imagine what might happen if we got inventive about how to help people want and delight in things that are truly good for them, instead of only ever trying to set want against need, temptation against goodness, desire against virtue, willpower against sloth—all of it with an emphasis on helping big companies make big money.
One NYT reader, Sarah from Iowa, offered the opening lines of Mary Oliver’s poem “Wild geese” in response:
You do not have to be good. You do not have to walk on your knees for a hundred miles through the desert, repenting. You only have to let the soft animal of your body love what it loves.
The series that begins here will be an exploration of how these soft animals that are our bodies have been systematically prevented from loving what they love, why this matters so much (to eating-disorder recovery and prevention and in many other ways), and what we can do about it. It’s a line of argumentation that is probably implicit in almost everything I’ve written on this blog over the past 17 years—in posts on anything from self-weighing and target weights to recovery meal plans and powerlifting, from “wasting time” to letting go or “letting yourself go”. And I think it’s high time to make it more explicit: numbers have their uses, of course, but they are terribly easily abused, because the machines put them at our fingertips and we humans are suckers for false precision.
So, in the forthcoming parts of the series, we’ll cover aspects of the “living by numbers” problem including:
I hope that the upshot won’t be merely a bland reiteration of the “trust your body, not the numbers” diktat, but instead a clearer view than we might have had before about the role of certain kinds of numbers in matters of life, death, and lives worth living.
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Emily T. Troscianko, Ph.D., is a researcher and writer with a particular interest in the links between fiction-reading and mental health.
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This article is part of the Bringwise Psychology Journal — daily insights on human behavior, mental health, and personal growth.