Say No to Numbers
Fun little factoid about Quinn Runs [you know, the awesome blog that you’re reading right now]: this blog received its 1000th unique visitor this week! Over a thousand individual people, not counting repeated visits by the same person, have viewed Quinn Runs in some capacity. How cool is that?! Obviously, I think it’s pretty neat.
I love statistics like this. Generally, I think numbers are pretty fun. I’m also a big list-maker—seriously, I have this journal that I initially bought for chronicling my life but that has now turned into a red Moleskine list repository. There’s pragmatic ones, like Groceries Week of June 17 and Dave Birthday Ideas, as well as the idealistic, such as Grand Canyon Road Trip Stops, and even the random [Adjectives to Describe Running, I’m looking at you]. You know, to name a few. Anyway, my point here is not to give you a deep dive look into my personal journal and possibly neurotic listing habits. Mainly it’s to bring up a larger point: listed, numbered organization suits me.
With that in mind, it makes sense that I often organize my fitness and health goals in this way—numbered lists. Five Summer Fitness Goals, Six Slump Slaying Strategies. It recently occurred to me that this organizational practice oddly enough matches that of the diet culture and body shaming mongers that I try so hard to avoid and speak out against: Ten Moves to Get a Hot Body in Three Weeks, for example. So, I started thinking harder about the role that numbers like this play in my life and my own fitness journey. How does contemporary negative “health” culture use numbers in a manipulative way, and how can I avoid using numbers in that way when I employ them in my own goals?
Numbers are exact. They don’t leave room for error, for interpretation—or at least that’s what we think. We tend to trust numbers, take them seriously, ascribe to them meaning that they don’t, as symbols, inherently carry. It’s problematic though, in a way that I’m sure many of us feel but that is often difficult to express. The “five” in “I gained five pounds” doesn’t naturally have a connotation of negativity or positivity, but we give it that in the context of using it to discuss weight. Now, “five” has emotional resonance [kind of like how dollar bills are actually just pieces of cloth that only have transactional value because we say they do]. So it’s a thing that we do in society, giving meaning to symbols. Why does that practice become fraught when involved in discussions of health?
While we often place a lot of trust in numbers, they can frequently be misleading. I stumbled upon a perfect example of this on a [truly ridiculous and numerically manipulative] post on some strange “health” account that liked one of my @quinnruns posts. This account’s bio claimed that it would explain to me “why your fat,” which, in addition to being horrifying grammatically, is horrifying from a fat-shaming perspective and diet culture perspective and generally just shocking that someone on social media whom I don’t know apparently wants to tell me that a) I am fat and b) how I got that way. Even better [and by “better,” I definitely mean worse] was the content posted to this page. One grainy picture showed an entire pepperoni pizza with the caption that two slices of pepperoni pizza equals 64 pounds. Okay, obviously that’s not true. I kept reading, and the caption explained in more words: two slices of pepperoni pizza every day for a year equals 64 pounds gained in that year. Hmm... that seems... EXTREMELY UNTRUE!
Wildly fake Instagram account aside, I’m sure that you can do some kind of calculation to posit that two slices of pepperoni pizza every day somehow equals 64 pounds added to one’s body. But... can you? What if I eat two pieces of pepperoni pizza every day for dinner but I have a balanced meal for lunch and I exercise frequently? What if I eat two pieces of pepperoni pizza every day for breakfast but I have a fast metabolism and actually have trouble keeping weight on? Yeah, this logic about two slices equaling 64 pounds is clearly flawed. But it is eye-catching. And that’s the problem. That claim sounds like it has calculations and research and, you know, science-y stuff behind it. I think about that pizza I had while out with friends last week and I wince a little bit. But I should not wince! This random “fact” has no merit and obviously does not apply to every person, if it even applies to anyone! The moral of this story: live your life, and if that life includes two pieces of pepperoni pizza each day, then more power to you!
Alright, that’s not the actual moral of the story that I was attempting to get to. What I mean to say is that I believe that the “health” industry [quotes because I’m talking about things like slimming tea promoters and crash diets] uses numbers in ways that are purposefully misleading and knowingly provoke an emotional response through the use of numbers as meaning-inflated symbols.
Looking back at my life since senior year of high school, when I got my first Planet Fitness membership and started going to the gym regularly, it’s easy to see what numbers mattered to me: those three digits that constitute my weight. My original fitness goal was to lose ten pounds. I’ve always measured my fitness and health in numbers. Before prom my sophomore year of high school, I was dead set on losing 10 pounds in 14 days with a strict interpretation of the Atkins diet. Even when I don’t have a specific goal like that, I’m constantly counting: calories, pounds, active minutes, miles. Hours of sleep, days in the gym, weeks of negative weight. Why am I doing this? Why do I feel like fitness is so tied to precise numerical valuations?
My working theory is that the negatively provocative advertising by the diet industry that centers around numerical goals and threats has subliminally linked numbers and success in terms of fitness, at least for me. If you’re not measuring it, are you really doing it? As I’ve stopped counting calories and started intuitive eating, and am also trying to ease up on myself at the gym and practice more kindness towards my body, I’ve started questioning this whole numbers gimmick. Are numbers helping me set quantifiable goals or are they holding me to stringent rules that don’t leave room for flexibility concerning my body and its varying needs?
This is definitely a question I intend to pursue further, and for the time being I’m going to do that my lessening my emphasis on numbers in the goals that I set for myself. For instance, if I set a goal to run ten miles next weekend, then 9.5 miles is technically a failure. If I set a goal to go for a long run that I feel good about, 9.5 miles could easily be a success. But which way is better? Is it more beneficial to enforce that numerical goal and push myself? Or is it better to take cues from my body but not necessarily get as far every time and possibly take longer to achieve my overall goals?
I do want to specify that I don’t think the problem is the numbers themselves, but the emotional significance that we’ve attached to them. For instance, there’s a lot of talk about throwing away the scale and distancing yourself from numerical assessments of your weight. But then I talk to people who tell me that they just consider their weight another data point and don’t feel any emotion related to that number shrinking or growing. In my opinion, that is the idea situation. Numbers are a legitimate form of measurement in and of themselves—not, to be clear, a form of measuring self-worth or the worth of others, but legitimate in that weight can be quantified in pounds and runs can be quantified in miles. It’s helpful to have these matrices for objectively describing our bodies and the things that we do. We shouldn’t disregard numbers altogether.
It’s easier said than done though, like most things. Easier to just disregard numbers than to find a way to continue using them while simultaneously getting rid of emotional connotations related to numerical measurements. I, for one, am definitely not sure how to do that second part. So, I’m going to test out loosening my numerical restraints and see what results that yields—in both quantifiable and qualifiable terms.
I’ll definitely keep you all updated on my no-numbers adventure. For now, I’m going to focus that no-numbers mentality on taking a break from weighing myself in an attempt to disassociate specific foods and workouts from weight fluctuation. I want to get better at taking cues from my body instead of from the scale!
As I wrap up this post, I want to open this discussion up to all of you. How do you think numbers play into fitness? It seems to me that they can be both helpful and detrimental—but how do we know where to draw that line? I’m so excited to hear from you guys on this topic!
