Watermelon Calories
We can experience food and we can record numbers, but can we both?
How do you experience a watermelon?
The experience of eating watermelon has much sensual appeal. The texture is unique, which offers a continuous crunch that lasts the entire bite. Like twisting bubble wrap, the crunch goes on and on. The bright red-pink color is also unique, contrasted with the green of the rind and the black of the seeds. The aroma is gentle but distinct. Then there’s the emotional experience that comes with eating watermelon. This might include the freedom of summer, the happiness of childhood, or the connection of gatherings.
The alternative watermelon experience is understanding it as a quantity against a greater number—from which one may determine whether their day was a success or failure.
These are the two options—watermelon bliss or watermelon calories.
What is the goal of watermelon calories?
Let’s take a moment to consider the experience of someone who searches for the calories in food aiming to stay below a target value (someone like me, who has invested a lot of time checking, logging, budgeting food in the past).
Are you someone who has documented what you ate as a strategy to lose weight? If so, was that really what you wanted? Consider this—if you were visited by a genie who could grant you a wish to lose weight or a wish to feel happy everyday, which would you choose? If you choose to lose weight, would being thinner make you happy? If you choose happy, would being happier make you thinner (or, would you even care anymore)?
Counting calories disengages us from our lives. If you decide to check, log, track, and budget your days, when can you stop? After you lose the weight, the diet apps need you to keep counting and tracking. There is no end. The process is a way of life—a lifestyle that you commit to following, indefinitely. (For more on this, check out another post.)
Win/Lose Mentality
When you use numbers to experience food, your day is a success or a failure based on the number when you go to bed. But it doesn’t stop there. Daily streaks are then possible where you can go two or three days, a week, a month, a season, a year, without ever losing the numbers game. When does it stop being fun? At what point does it shift from Hooray—I met my calorie goal today to If I don’t make my calorie limit today, my week will unravel out of control ? When this happens, the counting behavior transforms from a tracking exercise to a compulsion.
The fleeting nature of willpower has trained dieters to have a superstitious feeling about how and when to approach losing weight.
Watermelon Calories: The Alternative is to Listen
When I say watermelon, what is the first thought that pops in your head? Listen to that thought. If the thought reflects the joy of eating a watermelon, continue down that path. Do not get sidetracked by number anxiety. If the thought is something more like a number or aversive quality of watermelon (it has SUGAR!), then it might be time to face a though reality. It may be the case that the counting has created an artificial reality of anxiety-generating numbers that blocks you from accessing one of nature’s simplest pleasures—watermelon.
Are you ready for something different?
