Steps and Calories: What Gets Missed When We Focus on the Numbers
Thought For The Week
There’s something reassuring about a number.
Numbers allow us to compare, identify patterns and notice change. They give us something concrete to point to, making our conclusions easier to justify. They can also make the things we choose to overlook harder to ignore.
But numbers have limitations.
Even when they’re accurate, they only show us what’s being measured. They can’t tell us why something is happening, what effect it is having or what else might need to be taken into account.
To decide what to do with that information, we also need to consider the context and apply our own interpretation and judgement. That process is more subjective and usually requires more effort, but it’s no less important.
A number can also become a target we try to optimise or a yardstick we judge ourselves against. A change in the number can come to represent progress or failure, regardless of whether the choices behind it are still supporting what mattered to us in the first place.
Numbers can provide valuable information and bring our attention to something that needs to change. But they are most useful when we treat them as one part of a bigger picture.
Exercise Focus
Step counters can draw our attention to something many of us might otherwise overlook and give us a clearer indication of how much we’re actually moving. That awareness can be the first step towards more physical activity.
But like any number, a step count only tells us what has been measured.
It might encourage us to take a walk on a day we’ve barely moved. But it doesn’t account for the hard training session we completed that morning, the poor night’s sleep we had, the illness we’re recovering from or the fact that we genuinely need to rest.
There’s also a line between using a number for information and feeling compelled to hit it. That line can be easily crossed because we tend to optimise what we measure.
As that happens, we can start to rely on the metric instead of our own judgement. We might look to the number for reassurance that we’ve done enough, or override fatigue and the need for rest because we haven’t yet reached it.
The problem isn’t the step counter itself. It’s the point at which hitting the number becomes more important than what it was meant to support.
A step count can tell us how many steps we’ve taken. It cannot tell us what our body needs.
Nutrition Focus
Calories tell us how much energy a food or drink contains, and tracking them can make us more aware of how much we’re consuming. That awareness can be a useful starting point for understanding changes in body weight and may highlight things we had previously overlooked.
But counting calories only tells us about energy intake.
It doesn’t tell us how much protein, fibre or other nutrients a food provides. It can’t tell us how satisfying we’ll find it, how long it will keep us full or how it fits alongside the rest of what we’ve eaten.
A calorie target can also become something we try to optimise.
Instead of using the number as one source of information, we may start organising our food around it. We might automatically choose the lowest-calorie option, ignore hunger because we have reached our allowance or treat exceeding the target as failure.
The problem isn’t the number of calories something contains. It’s allowing that number to become the main way we judge a food, a meal or our success.
A lower-calorie choice is not automatically the more nourishing or appropriate one. Equally, choosing something higher in calories doesn’t mean we have made a poor decision. The wider context matters.
Calories can help us understand how much energy we’re consuming. But deciding what and how much to eat requires us to consider that information alongside nutrition, hunger, satisfaction, activity and our goals.
Explore More
From the archive: Numbers can help us understand our habits, but they can also begin to influence how we think, feel and behave. In Self-Awareness vs Self-Surveillance: How Tracking, Metrics, and Data Work Against You I explore the point at which useful monitoring starts to become more problematic.
Book: The Number Bias by Sanne Blauw explores why we place so much trust in numbers and the ways they can mislead us when separated from context.
Scientific paper: In this recent study, researchers compared the calorie information displayed for 295 menu items with their measured energy content. More than a third differed by over 20%. It’s a useful reminder that numbers may be less exact than they appear.
Takeaway
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