One morning I walked into the goodsugar store on 69th Street. If you are reading this while the place is still standing, come check it out. That morning a woman was by the bakery case, fit and focused, staring at the banana bread like it was calling her name. She spotted me and said, “You’re the owner, right? I’ve been meaning to talk to you. How many calories are in this banana bread?”
I smiled and said, “Come outside with me for a minute.” We stepped onto the sidewalk. “Tell me,” I asked, “how long have you been counting calories?”
She looked puzzled. “What do you mean?”
“When did it start?” I pressed.
“Probably when I was fourteen,” she said. She was twenty nine.
I nodded. “Okay, then let me ask you something else. Has counting calories ever made you happy?”
She thought about it. “Not really. But what am I supposed to do?”
I told her I was not trying to trigger anything, and that she already looked like she was in good shape. “What is your real objective? How much weight do you think you need to lose?”
“I don’t know,” she admitted.
“Then let me offer something,” I said. “Counting calories is only a first step. It teaches you that food affects you. But if you stop there, you miss the bigger picture. The real work is understanding your anxieties, your addictive patterns, the way you use food not just to feed your body but to manage your nerves.”
She nodded slowly. I went on.
“Imagine a giant bag of food with four thousand calories. If you ate the whole bag you might feel lousy. Without awareness, you would not even connect the dots that food is making you feel off. That lack of connection is how most people live. Childhood anxieties, addictive patterns, hormones, memory, it is all mixed in. And you are chasing numbers like they are the holy grail. Calories are not the holy grail.”
I asked her to try a small experiment. “Next time we talk, bring me a list of everything you eat in a month. Forget the numbers. Just make the list. Then ask one simple question: does this food bring nutrition into my body, or does it bring toxins? That’s it. Food either supports you or it makes you sick. Some things bring both, and the body can filter some toxins, but not forever. When the load is too high, the body breaks down.”
I explained that a two hundred calorie frozen yogurt may give her fuel but almost no vitamins, minerals, or antioxidants. Worse, it might bring hidden compounds the body was never designed to handle. “The government regulates some ingredients, but not nearly enough. Junk food gets a free pass because it does not kill you instantly like poison. Instead it erodes you slowly, and people defend it like a sacred ritual because they connect it with happy moments. Cotton candy at a carnival, soda at the movies. These foods light up the brain like any drug. They change the experience of existence for a moment. That is why they are hard to let go.”
I told her food addiction is one of the most complex patterns humans face. We can starve ourselves, binge, obsess over protein or gluten or fat grams. We can get so anxious about food that the anxiety itself becomes the illness. The way out is awareness and honesty. The sooner we see our addictive patterns, the sooner we can change them.
She listened quietly, grateful. And I felt sincere. I was not judging. I was giving her something real to consider.
Why was I so comfortable in that conversation? Because I grew up in a house full of compulsive overeating. My father and my sister carried that weight, and I carried it with them. Even when we never spoke about food, they were sitting at the table with me in spirit at every meal. It took me forty years to realize I needed to let them find their own way. I could love them, I could support them, but I could not carry their pain on my plate.
Food is not just food. It is memory. It is anxiety. It is our relationship with our body and with life itself. And it is everywhere. We live in a world buried in garbage food, yet we are also on the edge of a new wave. The science is better, the conversation about mental health is louder, and people are waking up to the connection between diet, self esteem, and peace of mind.
I practice these principles daily, not because I am perfect, but because if I do not, I slide back into confusion. That woman taught me as much as I taught her. She reminded me that beneath every calorie question is a human being trying to find relief from anxiety, trying to make peace with their body, trying to remember what it feels like to feel safe inside themselves.