When food tracking goes wrong

This post is near and dear to my heart and something that I’ve resisted writing. With the fitness and nutrition industry the way it currently is, everyone seems to be tracking food in some way. Maybe you are on Carb Nite and only track your carbs (it doesn’t take much to track less than 30g carbs a day, but still). Maybe you just pay attention to hitting a certain number of grams of each macro per meal for a certain number of meals per day. Maybe you only eat from a certain list of foods. Maybe you have custom macros from any number of the programs out there that offer this (both qualified and not so qualified folks unfortunately) and you eat what “fits”. What I have discovered though, is this can be great for people who need increased awareness of food quality, quantity and how to eat based on goals. This can be bad when is goes wrong. When it goes wrong it can lead to the realm of the eating disorders. If you believe you have an eating disorder, contact your local Mental Health service or talk to your doctor. This is not psychological or medical advice that can take the place of a true assessment from a qualified practitioner. In this current fitness atmosphere, I need to emphasize the qualified part of that. Please, your health and wellbeing is that important. Now I got that out of the way...

Tracking food and having a structured plan is actually a method of treatment for eating disorders in some centres. It’s a fantastic place to start for many people to help “quiet the noise” as Dr. Laura Hill states. It allows folks to eat without spiking anxiety and when we keep anxiety from spiking, we can keep people from spiraling back into extreme restriction. The Center for Balanced Living http://www.centerforbalancedliving.org/ has some information on this I’ll just refer to here, because I’m not really talking about those folks who have a diagnosed eating disorder and are working with a qualified practitioner on wellness. I am talking about the people that are walking the fine line on the slippery slope of maladaptive eating. Instead of referring to this as eating disorders, I will refer to this as maladaptive eating. Just because you don’t meet the criteria for a diagnosis, does not mean you don’t have problems with eating. It just means that given our current diagnostic manual you do not have “enough” symptoms or they are not severe enough. It’s well acknowledged that there are a huge number of people that walk this line between healthy eating and full on meet the criteria. While I haven’t read anything on statistics about this lately, I suspect it is only growing. I understand the idea of flexible dieting is that it should reduce the tendency to restrict and fear certain foods (I definitely think it is miles ahead of something like carb nite where almost all carbs are restricted) but what happens for people that become inflexible with “flexible dieting”.

Things I have actually heard from people – “I forgot to track the 15 grapes I ate and when I log them I’m over my carbs”, “you can buy a scale to put in your purse and take it to the restaurant to weigh your food when it comes”, “I went over my macros today, should I restrict tomorrow?” Most of these seem pretty harmless, but they are all subtle warning signs that something is not right with food. Can you pick out what might be wrong here?

Tracking your food is a tool. It should not dictate your life. You should not avoid social situations on a regular basis out of fear you cannot track something (keeping in mind, I understand when people have a deadline that is different – when I need to make weight soon, I’m not going out for supper with the rest of you!). You should not be panicked if you forget your purse scale at home, or alternately, refuse to eat. You should not fear one day of going over a certain macro (or even all your macros!!) You should not believe that this is the ultimate in truth and you base everything about your day on it. As Dr. John Berardi once said “it’s all estimates” and he’s right. The science behind this isn’t perfect anyway, so don’t treat it as such.