This past weekend, for the first time since I started getting my health in order, I didn't track what I ate. We were out-of-town, hiking almost 14 miles a day. I'd carefully purchased some snacks. We weren't in the wilderness — I didn't have to worry about the weight of our packs, and we had access to restaurants for all our meals. But I didn't track those meals — didn't add each bite of food into an app to calculate how many calories, how much protein I'd consumed. I ate if and when I was hungry — and with 14 miles a day, I was pretty hungry. I ate big meals at restaurants — deep fried calamari two nights in a row, just as an appetizer.

Not surprisingly, when I stepped on the scale on Monday morning, my weight was up significantly. Some of this was certainly a result of eating at restaurants — more sodium, more fat than my home cooking. Some of it was probably water retention from the amount of fluids I consumed during and after our excursions. But some of the weight gain was surely that I ate a lot more than I typically do — and just as importantly, I ate differently: snacking constantly versus just eating my usual four meals a day (that's pre-workout breakfast, post-workout breakfast, lunch, and dinner.)

I spend a lot of time thinking about food. I knew, for example, what I'd order at the restaurants where we ate well before we sat down and were handed menus. I knew I wanted some calamari, obviously. And I'd carefully planned what snacks would fill our backpacks. (Note: the Epic protein bars made out of buffalo and cranberries are absolutely fucking disgusting and nothing like my inner child imagined this pemican-like product to be.) The snacks were "healthy" (but not joyless); but even so, I didn't want to worry too much about whether or not I hit all my "macros" — or at least my protein goals — during what was supposed to be a fun weekend getaway.

One question for me going into the weekend: could I "intuitively" choose the kinds of foods and the amount of food that my body needed? "Intuitive eating" is, after all, supposed to be optimal: no need to count calories or manage macros; you just need to listen to your body.

But it's such a problematic concept — the idea that "intuition" is the same for everyone, for starters; the idea that "intuition" leads you to eat in such a way that you'll be "healthy" — read: thin; the idea that "intuition" coincides with the foods that are available and affordable; and so on. Even if I "listen to my body," I'm not sure I know how to interpret its signals. It's not simply that I don't trust my body — that's the result of a lifetime of cultural conditioning about diet and beauty — it's that I'm really not sure if what I want to eat — other than, ya know, all the food — is precisely the thing I should be eating. And even that "should" is tricky — what should I eat, for example, when I've hiked 14 miles? My body says "everything," and I am happy to oblige. But what does my body need for recovery, for sustenance, for strength? (It seems as though the verb "should" runs counter to the notion of "intuition.")