When it comes to edible calories, I'm pretty much an expert. I can eyeball and guess the calories in pretty much anything, and those numbers seem to stick in my mind for the rest of eternity. Need to know the calories in a stalk of celery or a cucumber? I'm your girl.

A large part of my eating disorder was limiting the number of calories I ate (or at least balancing that with how much I exercised). Life became a series of numbers: calories, fat grams, pounds, minutes exercised. And the more I could limit the first three of those numbers, the better I tended to feel. Though my diet was rather bland and boring, I enjoyed how it "tasted" of control and strength and willpower. I enjoyed how soothing it was to know exactly what I was going to eat and when.

Calories. The fewer, the better. That was my life for the past decade in about five words.

It was relieving, in a sense, to be told what to eat. Either the anorexia was telling me what to eat, or it was my dietitian. Deciding (remember The Paradox of Choice?) was often freakishly difficult, and I still rely on rules and regulations to help me meet my dietary needs. Often I fantasize about someone giving me The Perfect Food Plan that tells me exactly what to eat and when.

But I was reading the 360 Degrees of Mindful Living blog, and the author, Pavel Somov, wrote about Experiential Calories:

A Nutritional Calorie is a unit of energy. The job of a Nutritional Calorie is to fuel your Body. An Experiential Calorie – to coin a term — is a unit of awareness, a unit of conscious presence, a unit of meaning. The job of an Experiential Calorie is to enrich your Mind.

Of course, the chief thing I restricted in the course of my eating disorder was food. I'm not trying to deny that. But throughout my eating disorder, "restricting" became more than just a way of eating, it became a way of life. I restricted money but not letting myself buy things (or panicking when I did). I restricted social experiences by isolating myself. I restricted fun by always making myself work or do something "useful."

The very first therapist I saw, just as the ED was taking hold and a good 6 months before I had a clue that my increasing food obsessions were in any way problematic, assigned me 30 minutes of "fun" each day. I told her I was too busy for fun, fun was for sissies, I'm already living on 4 hours of sleep- how am I going to manage on three-and-a-half?, I had no use for fun. No, she told me, 30 minutes of fun, every day. Fine, I said, I'll do my fun but you can't make me enjoy it!

Not surprisingly, the thought of spending thirty! whole! minutes! doing! nothing! caused so much anxiety that I never really did it. I never realized this restriction-of-fun had anything to do with my eating disorder. And I never realized how hard it would be for me to begin incorporating other sorts of "calories" in my life.

I've never especially had a problem fueling my brain with Intellectual Calories. I'm a geek. If my brain doesn't get enough Intellectual Calories, it seems that restricting my food calories can't be far behind. But things like Social Calories and Fun Calories and Soothing Calories? They seem somehow bizarre and unnecessary- much like food does when I'm in the throes of anorexia. Yet they very much are necessary (yes, Carrie, just like food!), even though they remain absurdly nebulous.

I think these Experiential Calories are a bit more neglected in eating disorder recovery, in part because it is hard to measure them precisely. But at this past year's NEDA conference, Nancy Zucker spoke of how, even well into recovery, many of her patients' lives seem somewhat rigid or restricted somehow, as if the AN mindset has permeated their lives in every respect, not just food. Obviously, correcting the intake of food calories needs to come first, because a deficit of food calories is immediately life threatening. Experiential calories can wait a bit, if for no other reason than a malnourished person can't take in experiential calories very well. But me and others with EDs need to learn how to regulate both food and experiential calories in our lives.

Guidelines on how many food calories we should eat each day permeate our culture. They're not always right for everyone, but they're there. These Experiential Calories of which I write tend to vary even more between person to person. Whether the Faceless Internet Nutrition Providers will take a hint from the Experiential Calorie folks remains to be seen, but I would love nothing more than a set of rules or guidelines to tell me how much socializing I need to do and how much "fun" I need to have.

I guess this means I need to increase my intake of Flexibility Calories, eh?