My Morning Pages: Chronicles of living through Burnout by Carol Miltersteiner

Author:Carol Miltersteiner
Language: eng
Format: epub
Tags: Biographies & Memoirs, Memoir Short Reads, Stress Management, Mental Health, Burnout
Published: 2020-04-02T16:00:00+00:00

DAY NINETY

December 12th, 2018

Metrics are a two-edged sword.

They can inform us of our progress in a particular part of our lives and give us incredible insights, but they can also render us captive, addicted to them. In an increasingly measurable world, it can be both marvelous and terrifying to be able to track our steps, our amount of sleep, our number of followers on social media, our hours worked, the number of calories we consume.

I struggled with eating disorders for most of my young and adult life. After several treatments, experiments and strategies, I can finally say that I am over it. Not that I am eating impeccably, that I don’t eat like a beast sometimes, but I don’t lose myself over it, and it doesn’t trouble me anymore.

There were a handful of approaches that led me to recovery. Therapy is definitely the strongest one. Medication, considering my challenging mental setting, has been essential. Moving to a country where looks are not such an obsession as in Brazil (the second-largest consumer of plastic surgery in the world1) was certainly convenient. But there’s another one, silly, and incredibly powerful, that has been a game changer in my recovery: I don’t measure my weight anymore.

I don’t quite remember why or how this started. I do remember that one day I decided to retire my scale - one of the first things I had bought when I moved to Europe.

It has now been a year and two months since I stepped on a scale for the last time. If you’d ask me, I’d have no clue how much I weigh now: 60, 65, 70 kg...? Not knowing has freed me.

Stepping on a scale, especially if you have an eating disorder, is always a losing game.

There is no good outcome when measuring your weight: you’re either disappointed with the result, becoming anxious, or you become overconfident because you performed above expected. In both cases, you feel entitled to send whatever treatment or diet you were on to hell.

Now that I think of it, many of the metrics we surround ourselves with have kind of the same effect. If they’re good, we feel entitled to stop doing the work that led to it: if they’re not, we beat ourselves up, question our worth and go downhill from there.

This is not to say that we should ignore metrics altogether. The fact that I don’t weigh myself (neither count the calories I eat or the calories I burn) anymore does not mean I gave up on taking care of my body. I just changed the KPI’s2.

Instead of looking at the scale for answers about my health, I check in with a few indicators that work for me: am I sleeping well? Is my immunity good? Am I eating when I’m hungry and ignoring urges and compulsive behaviours? Do I make enough time to move my body (go for walks, do some yoga)?

For over 15 years of my life, I wanted to weigh less than 60 kg. Why, do you ask? I don’t know.

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