The Things a Tracker Can't Measure
How self-monitoring gets in the way of eating disorder recovery.
Posted May 31, 2026 | Reviewed by Lybi Ma
As a psychotherapist specializing in the treatment of eating disorders, I spend a lot of time sitting with people who come to me wearing Oura Rings and Apple Watches to log their calories, macros, sleep, steps, and heart rate variability. The stated goal is usually health. Yet beneath the language of wellness, there is often anxiety about weight, appearance, aging, or the belief that changing our bodies will somehow improve our lives.
The Hidden Costs of Optimization Culture
We live in a culture that sees optimization as a virtue. Tracking devices sell certainty and control, and who doesn’t want that? The implicit promise is that if you gather enough information about yourself, you can eventually get it right.
What I keep coming back to is the emotional cost of that promise and the ways it can pull us away from our own lived experience. For people recovering from eating disorders, that cost is anything but abstract. Recovery often involves learning to trust your body again, yet many of these tools encourage us to trust data over our own internal experience. At some point, many of us stopped inhabiting our lives and started auditing them instead. Eating disorder recovery is, in large part, about finding our way back.
Interoception versus External Metrics
A huge part of recovery involves rebuilding interoceptive awareness, the ability to recognize hunger, fullness, fatigue, emotions, and satisfaction from within rather than relying on external rules or metrics. Patients have to learn to trust what their bodies are telling them, which is already difficult when perfectionism , anxiety, and rigid thinking are part of the picture. Many have spent years overriding their internal cues to the point that those signals have become faint or difficult to recognize.
Adding continuous biometric tracking to that mix gives the anxious brain one more set of numbers to analyze, question, and worry about. Recovery asks people to loosen their grip on control and reconnect with their internal experience. Trackers often pull in the opposite direction.
When Data Undermines Experience
I see it in my practice all the time. Someone wakes up feeling rested and ready for the day ahead, only to check the sleep tracker, which shows they had interrupted sleep and too little REM . Within seconds, the energy they felt moments earlier is replaced by doubt, worry, and the nagging belief that they are somehow less prepared for the day ahead than they thought. Someone goes for a walk because it is a beautiful day and movement feels good, then keeps circling the block even when it starts pouring rain, and their feet hurt because they have not reached their daily step goal. Over time, people lose the ability to trust what they actually feel, and that loss is exactly what recovery is trying to reverse.
The Emotional Toll of Tracking
I do not use trackers myself, but I know the feeling of having the air let out of a moment. You spend a wonderful afternoon with people you love, you come home full in the best sense of the word, and then someone mentions that you all hit X amount of steps or that they went over their calories for the day; now they are anxious about the breakfast everyone had been looking forward to at that diner you read about. And just like that, the afternoon gets quietly reclassified. What felt like a good day becomes data. What felt like enough becomes something to compensate for.
Reclaiming Trust in Your Body
If you are in eating disorder recovery and wearing a tracker, it may be worth getting curious about the role it is playing in your life. Is it helping you connect with your body, or giving you one more reason to question what it's telling you?
The devices provide data. What they cannot tell you is whether you are genuinely hungry, satisfied, lonely , stressed , content, or in need of rest. They cannot tell you what a meaningful afternoon with friends feels like or whether singing along to a favorite song on a long drive made your day a little better.
Recovery is not about becoming better at tracking yourself. It is about learning to notice what is happening inside yourself and responding to it. It is about recognizing hunger and fullness, honoring fatigue, making room for enjoyment, and learning to trust your own experience again. That kind of trust will never show up as a score on an app, but in my experience, it is one of the most important parts of recovery.
Share this post Facebook Bluesky Linkedin Email
There was a problem adding your email address. Please try again.
By submitting your information you agree to the Psychology Today Terms & Conditions and Privacy Policy
Carolyn Karoll, LCSW-C, CEDS-S, is a therapist specializing in the treatment of eating disorders and co-author of the forthcoming Eating Disorder Group Therapy: A Collaborative Approach .
Get the help you need from a therapist near you–a FREE service from Psychology Today.
This article is part of the Bringwise Psychology Journal — daily insights on human behavior, mental health, and personal growth.