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A simple magic-wand question about the eating-disorder field yielded an answer about the problem with numbers.

The overuse of quantification often contributes to unreflective, patronizing, and ineffective moralizing.

This series explores the damage being done by making everything numerical, and how we could reverse the trend.

Whatever field we work in, things to get annoyed, frustrated, even angry about are probably easily found. It can be good to temper them with the creativity that comes from pretending, for a brief liberated moment, that there are no constraints: that we have a magic wand and a wish to be granted, and no need to be depressed or resentful anymore.

Amongst the many great questions that a recent spell of career coaching involved, one of them did this for me. Of my work with eating disorders and recovery, my coach asked: If you could make one change in the system, what would it be? And my off-the-cuff answer was: I’d change how we think about healthy eating and movement from numbers-based to instinct-based.

Losing your instincts by replacing them with numbers is often somewhere close to the centre of how an eating disorder takes hold. (In one early post, for example, I explored the weirdness of how eating-disorder rules that seem at any given moment immovable nonetheless evolve enormously over the years—and how their numerical guises help the arbitrary appear absolute.) So in a simple sense, this imagined magic is a reversal of that, at a global scale: gathering all the labels and apps and guidelines and scales into one enormous bonfire and letting the ashes feed the regrowth of intuition, appetite, and all the other forms of bodily........

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