Counting Almonds: The Illusion of Control Around Food
She counted almonds with the precision of a pharmacist—seven exactly, never six, never eight. I watched my friend arrange her lunch with mathematical ceremony, each portion measured against invisible standards that governed her existence more completely than any external authority ever could.
“It’s not about the food,” she said when I finally asked. “It’s about having something that’s completely mine to control.”
That phrase rewrote my understanding of human behavior: completely mine to control.
In a world where bosses dictate schedules, families demand attention, society imposes expectations, and circumstances conspire against plans—the body becomes the last territory where absolute sovereignty seems possible. What enters, when it enters, how much enters: these decisions can feel like the final frontier of personal autonomy.
But the cruel mathematics of eating disorders reveal sovereignty as elaborate prison. The person who controls every calorie becomes controlled by the need to control every calorie. The body that was meant to be ruled becomes the ruler, dictating terms with increasing tyranny.
I think about my own moments of food control—the week I ate only rice and dal to prove some point to myself about simplicity, the month I eliminated sugar as demonstration of willpower, the times I’ve used dietary restriction as medal of self-discipline rather than path to health.
These weren’t eating disorders in clinical terms, but they shared the same psychological foundation: the belief that controlling consumption equals controlling life, that mastery over appetite demonstrates mastery over existence itself.
The deeper tragedy isn’t the food obsession—it’s the underlying sense of powerlessness that makes food control feel necessary. When everything else feels chaotic, uncertain, subject to forces beyond our influence, the plate becomes parliament where we can finally legislate with absolute authority.
But bodies are not democracies waiting for our governance. They’re ecosystems that have maintained life for millennia without our conscious interference, sophisticated systems that know hunger and satiety, that can regulate and repair themselves when trusted rather than micromanaged.
“I just want to feel normal around food,” she said months later, after therapy, after the slow work of rebuilding trust between mind and body. Normal—meaning unconscious, automatic, guided by internal wisdom rather than external rules.
The paradox of control: the more desperately we grasp for it, the more completely it eludes us. The person who counts every almond becomes enslaved by counting. The person who trusts their body’s signals achieves the very autonomy that control-seeking was meant to provide.
Recovery isn’t about learning new rules for eating—it’s about unlearning the belief that the self requires such intensive management, that the body is enemy to be defeated rather than ally to be trusted.
Maybe true control isn’t about imposing will upon appetite, but about creating conditions where healthy appetite can emerge naturally, where the body’s wisdom can operate without interference from the mind’s anxiety about not being in charge.
The most controlled person in the room might be the one who’s forgotten how to control anything, who trusts the ancient intelligence that has kept humans alive long before we developed the arrogance to believe we could improve upon hunger.
