I won’t lie to you. As I write this, I am eating my lunch of carrots, eggs, salmon, and chicken. It is making for a smelly, somewhat distracted meal.

That being said, it is an active choice I’m making, and one that I’m comfortable with. Why exactly? Because I weigh and measure my food.

In the past, I have undeniably struggled with portion control. Food can be just so fun, great, insert-verb-here, and a pretty damn good way in a lot of respects to comfort (and numb?) oneself from the inevitable struggles of life.

In this vein, it’s been true trial and error to figure out how I can liberate myself from this. Because, while eating for something other than hunger has its positives, it’s a false, hollow, shallow solution (yes, all of these contradictory adjectives. YOU write a daily-ish blog!). My variable weight and appearance can attest to my journey of zero awareness, to extreme intermittent fasting, to where I have returned to: tracking what I eat with as limited estimation as possible.

I think to a lot of people, and to me at first, this can come off as a overly strict means of living. I don’t disagree with some of the points here – it can be tedious and annoying to weigh out every portion (shouts out meal prep). But the legitimate liberation I experience from having to wonder how much I should eat at each meal, from restriction and binging cycles, from being unsure of my macro intake/what foods are providing the majority of my calories, is a surprisingly sweet prize.

I’ve seen this written about it well in two different articles: This one by NYT Magazine, and the principles of Food Addicts Anonymous. From the latter:

“Weighing and Measuring. When we weigh and measure our food, we place boundaries around it. Written food plans, digital scales, and measuring spoons take the guesswork out of choosing our quantities of food. We soon find it a relief to eat only and exactly what we have committed to eat—no licking, no tasting, nothing more and nothing less. Paradoxically, we feel satisfied.”

While I still engage in distracted eating (I’m looking at you, Jack from 20 minutes ago), I can do with the peace of mind that it won’t be (totally) mindless. I simply savor food more when I create this awareness around it.

This clicks for me. I wonder how others, perhaps readers of this blog, feel about their relationship with food.