For me, the biggest fuel that powered my eating disorder was calorie counting.
When I first learnt that if I created a calorie deficit in that if I ate less than I gave out, I could lose weight faster, my attitude to health and dieting changed. And when I say changed I mean that it plummeted. I was already noting my calorie intake on a mobile app and eventually I was comparing these numbers to numbers that I saw on the treadmill at the gym.
Unfortunately I spiralled until I was only consuming 70 calories a day whilst burning at least 1000. If I could not complete these calculations I would be enraged and upsets, throwing the most almighty of temper tantrums.
However, as I started to recover, I began to learn more about nutrition - to look at all the different nutrients in a meal, to think of my 5 a day, and to respond to my bodies natural signals.
So why did I allow these numbers to dominate my mind?
Most governments have now enshrined a calorie counting policy, encouraging restaurants and food distributors to include the calories on their menus and packaging, often taking precedence over nutritional information. This provides us with a skewed understanding of nutrition as we begin to see what is healthy as being low calorie, but this can result in us favouring a can of diet coke over that of a banana as the latter has more calories.
However, most of the calculations of calorie content are often wrong with 18% of products missing their true counts. This is because measuring calories was originally done within a fire oven to measure the amount of energy given off when a food product is burnt. But, as the human stomach is incredibly different from that of an oven, the real life journey of food can sometimes take a day to process. Furthermore, the digestion process can vary among different people as our genetics, gut bacteria and the amount of sleep we get can also play a vital part in how we store energy. On top of this, the way that we prepare food can also affect the amount of calories it contains based on how we chop it up to how it's cooked.
The only reason that we have such a strong focus on calorie content is due to the growing concern around obesity starting in the 1960s. As more women joined the workforce, the public started dining out more and eating more ready meals. Because of this, people gradually became more concerned with what they were putting in their bodies which led to the start of the war on fat.
Big companies started promoting products containing sugar and carbs in the illusion that they were better for our health. However, this only coincided with the rise of obesity cases which led the government to promote calorie restrictions and counting methods.
This is done because those in power more often than not have stakes and claims within the diet industry, therefore the fear of losing money results in them creating policies so that they can have the best of both worlds. Neoliberal, individualist policies shift the responsibility to the consumer so that they (the rich white capitalist) can keep their money and power. Consequently, young, impressionable women (and some young men) are the victims of this who fall prey to these false labels, diet fads and get sucked into the industry.
I know because I was one of them.
What's worse is that those promoting the products often don't even use it themselves because they know that they are dangerous or false. The BBC conducted an investigation and caught influencers auditioning to promote a poisonous drink.
This is how toxic the industry has become.
We cannot let these numbers continue to influence us, because the only people that they benefit are those with wealth and power.
I do not want to repeat these numbers to encourage anyone who might be struggling. Please do not copy my behaviour. Use this as a warning for how dangerous this is. How very nearly, allowing these numbers to dictate my life, almost led to my death.
If you are worried about yourself or a loved one please call Beat on: 0808 801 0711 or 0808 801 0677.
BBC (2019) “Reality TV stars auditioned to 'promote' poison diet drink on Instagram.” BBC https://www.bbc.co.uk/news/newsbeat-50837267
Hosie, R (2019) “3 influencers were secretly filmed agreeing to promote a made-up weight loss drink that contained fatal hydrogen cyanide.” Insider. https://www.insider.com/influencers-agreed-promote-lethal-cyanide-weight-loss-drink-2019-12
Zak, P (2019) "Death of the Calorie." The Economist.
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