Since the age of 11, I have obsessed over numbers. The number of digits, the averages and ideals with which I compare them, the charts, the graphs and the calculations performed with those numbers has made me crazy. I have nightmares of giant slot machines where I keep throwing money away, trying to make the numbers add up:
height, weight, number of chins, caloric intake, heart rate, cholesterol, number of girls at the gym who are fatter than me, my dress size, fat grams, carbs, sugars, hip measurement, waist measurement, hip to waist ratio measurement, real age, metabolic age, blood pressure, number of crunches I can do in a minute, number of minutes it takes me to run/walk a mile, how many miles I walked, bra size, ring size, body fat percentage, number of laps I can swim, number of times I fell while trying to attain downward dog pose, number of formal dresses that didn’t fit, how many stairs I can climb, my insulin level, first day of my last period, last time I saw my hoo-ha without the use of a mirror, number of calories in my morning latte, number of times I ate fast food this week, the number of my favorite meal at McDonald’s, the number of people who think I should go on a diet, number of binges I’ve had this month, number of diets I’ve tried, total $$ spent on gym memberships and diet-related paraphernalia, number of people who are actually reading this blog…
OMG…are you exhausted? I am just after typing all of that. And to think that I’ve spent 2/3 of my life with these numbers floating around my head! I think that should have at least gotten me some extra credit in 7th grade pre-Algebra. That C was a little low, in my opinion.
At any rate, if these numbers are useful to you in your life…by all means, keep using them. I, however, am not sure if they are useful to me, or if they simply create more anxiety and waste floating around my head. The jury is still out on that one.
Interestingly, I had been working on the idea for this post for several days when I picked up “Thin is the New Happy”, a memoir by Valerie Frankel. In Chapter 6, I was intrigued and inspired by an experiment she tried. While trying “not-dieting”, Valerie purchased a clicker, which she then proceeded to click every time she had a negative body image thought. On one day, she “clicked 263 distinct instances of negative thought…including random barbs and assessments while looking at (her)self.” Wow! Over the course of 4 days, she also tracked thoughts related to sex, family, work, and money. On page 96, she sums up her results: “The cumulative four-day total of thoughts about sex, family, work, and money was only a bit higher than my one-day total of negative body image blips.”
In the remainder of Chapter 6, Valerie goes on to tell how she started learning to redirect her thoughts. Her epiphany moment came when she found herself walking right past a mirror without looking at herself. Instead, she was looking into the eyes of her daughter, who was smiling up at her. Her experiment led to the following realization as stated on page 99:
“Yes, counting negative thoughts on a clicker had come to this. I’d found the big idea, and I aspired to live by it from that moment on the street with Lucy forever forward. Simply put, I wanted to be a better person. And that, as I understood it, had absolutely nothing to do with the bulge of my belly.”
I am so grateful to Ms. Frankel for writing this, as it really helped me to grasp a very abstract concept. Perhaps the key to thinking thin, feeling thin, and getting healthy has more to do with changing the way you think, rather than attaining some numeric ideal. Perhaps the only numeric measurement I should worry about right now is to track my own negative thoughts and learn to redirect them. After all, negativity (at least for me) not only leads to binges, but also makes it so difficult to rebound from setbacks and plateaus on a weight loss journey. I think I just might head out and buy myself a clicker!
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