Measure Mania
How calorie counting can hurt rather than help
For as long as I remember, I’ve liked tracking stuff. I have spreadsheets that document anything from my LinkedIn contacts to finished subtitles projects to financial assets.
I use apps too. Splitwise, Monefy, Lose It!, Clockify, Mood Meter—you name it, I’ve probably got it.
I don’t know where this obsession with tracking comes from. A blind guess is it’s got something to do with my obsession with details. I want to know every minute detail about my life, so I endeavour to track everything that technology lends itself to.
Some of the tracking has proved vastly beneficial. Monefy has made budgeting and saving a breeze. A quick glance at my monthly overviews tells me where I’m spending most, or too much, of my money. A look at the past few months gives me a pretty accurate idea of how much I need to budget for future spending. Here’s a promotional screenshot of the app.
Plus, it’s colourful and I get to pick funny icons for different spending categories—what’s not to love!
Another app (or website, rather) that has changed my life is Clockify. If you’re not familiar with it, it’s a life saver especially for someone like me who doesn’t have fixed office hours.
By tracking exactly how much time I’m spending on each task (and categorising tasks by projects and clients), I know down to the second how much time each task takes and how productive I’m being that day/week/month.
Here’s an example of a pretty typical week. This is one of the many views possible within the website. You can also view your time usage by the actual tasks and in a calendar, so you know how your work is spread throughout the day.
Clockify has prevented my days from becoming sink holes where a full day has passed and I have no idea what I did. It gives me concrete evidence of how I’m spending my day and what I can do better. It’s a life changer for a productivity nut like me.
Another app that I used for almost two years and that also changed my life is the calorie counter Lose It! It helped me lose 9 kilograms without too much pain involved. Most importantly, though, it taught me to think of a fluffy piece of cake in terms of the calories it has rather than how much it weighs.
But a month and a half ago, I stopped using it. Here’s why.
Each week, the app tells you how much you’re under/over budget. (Mine was about 1,300 calories a day). And this is what I was beginning to see week in, week out.
Red, red everywhere.
I was counting calories religiously, painstakingly inputting each and every item, down to the last ingredient.
But I wasn’t keeping to my daily budget. The calorie counter turned into a log of my excesses, of week after week of “I’ll do better tomorrow,” without nothing ever changing.
Then one day, I had an epiphany.
I wasn’t using the calorie counter to eat better. I was delegating responsibility for my weight/health to the counter, expecting it to save me from myself.
This realisation was mind-blowing. I, a slave to tracking, finally discovered that tracking was only helpful so long as I use it as a tool for betterment. That there is a real danger of using it as an excuse to not take action and do what’s good for me.
Monefy and Clockify were great additions to my life. I was consistently using the data from them to make better money and productivity decisions.
But with Lose It!, I was instead using it as an excuse to indulge. It’s okay to eat that bag of crisps, I’m logging it, see? I know exactly how many calories it has. So I’ll eat one thing less elsewhere and it’ll all balance out.
Except I never did. I just ate, ate, then ate some more.
With that realisation that I was delegating responsibility for my weight/health to an app, I stopped the counting. I instead paid attention to what I was eating and focused on exercising regularly to build muscles and burn calories.
Do I still indulge in a bag of crisps from time to time? Sure.
But life is much less stressful without the constant food logging. I literally feel liberated from the tyranny I imposed on myself for so long.
With this lesson, I learned to use tracking as a tool and be weary of focusing too much on the tracking and too little on the fundamentals it’s measuring.
How about you? Are you a fellow sufferer of Measure Mania?
What tracking apps do you use, if any? And how have they changed your life?
Send me a reply, leave a comment. And if you have a friend who suffers from Measure Mania, consider sharing this with them using the nice, shiny, orange button below.
Until next Friday… Stay cool, stay safe, stay thoughtful,
Val