To live a healthy life, it is good to know a little about what you eat. But automatically counting your calories can cause you to develop a negative relationship with food. Do you want to improve your relationship with food? This is how you can stop counting calories automatically.
Try journalling as an intermediate phase
If you find it difficult to keep track of what you eat, you can keep a kind of food diary. Chances are you already did this, in an app or on paper, but the goal now is to focus less on what you eat and more on how you feel. Instead of calories, write down how hungry you were before you ate and how you felt after you ate. Of course you still write down what you ate, but that’s it. This shifts the focus from the numbers to the feeling you get from food. After a while, this ensures that you can build a healthier relationship with food.
Make it a habit to cover calorie information
Food packaging should tell us how many calories it contains. So you cannot avoid them completely. But if you want to stop counting calories, it’s certainly not a bad idea to cover this information as soon as you purchase a product. Cover it with tape or a marker so that you can no longer be confronted with it. Chances are you already know what number is under the tape. But because you take it out of sight, you are less likely to fixate on it. After a while you will also be less inclined to look at the labels at all.
Change the subject when someone starts talking about calories
If you want to make a change in your life you need willpower, and other people can play a big role in this. A conversation with someone about counting calories can be quite triggering. They can say things that make you feel like you have to look obsessively at the numbers. That’s annoying because you can hardly tell everyone in your life that they should never talk about this subject again. To address this more subtly, you can gently try to steer the conversation away from this specific point. This way you avoid hassle and you don’t get triggered.
Distract yourself when you notice yourself starting to count
Stopping automatic calorie counting is difficult. It is something you do automatically, or a habit. And you don’t just change a habit. The best way to change a habit is to replace the behavior with a new habit. Distract yourself when you feel like counting your calories. Do this, for example, by focusing on how you experience your meal. What exactly do you taste? What flavors are in your meal? After a while this becomes a new habit.
