Your Feelings Are Information… Not Data
The first time I went into maintenance, my coach gave me one job.
Put the jeans on. Once a week.
It was summer. I had just finished my bodybuilding show at the end of June, and we spent July pulling back and letting my body rest. By August we were back into training, and I was reverse dieting the whole way through it… more food, more glycogen, more water, more life in my body than I’d had in months. I actually felt energized. I could sleep again.
And most days, I felt lean and strong and capable. And then, out of nowhere, in the middle of a hot, sticky, humid summer, I’d hit a day where I felt chubby. Uncomfortable in my own skin. I’d start looking for something to fix, something to control, all from a feeling. So I’d put the jeans on. And every time, they fit exactly the same.
Which meant the feeling wasn’t data. It was information. I had just been reading it wrong.
Information vs Data
I make a real distinction between two words people tend to use like they’re interchangeable… information and data. This is just how I’ve come to define them in my own coaching, and it’s the lens I want to hand you here.
Data is a hard number. It’s a clothing size. It’s a measurement. It’s something undeniable, something tangible, something you could hand to another person and they’d see the exact same thing you’re seeing.
Information is different. I like to think of that word as informed… because it’s perception based, it’s feeling based, it’s a thought process. It’s not always something you could physically show somebody. It’s something you’re sensing.
There’s actually a name for that sensing. It’s called interoception… your body’s ability to pick up on internal signals. Hunger, fatigue, tension, heart rate, that vague sense that something is off before you can name why. Your nervous system is relaying something to you constantly, and that relay is what I mean when I say information. It’s real. It’s just not the same thing as a measurement, and how clearly that signal comes through can shift depending on your sleep, your stress, your hormones, how loaded your week has already been.
This is actually the same thing I lean on when I walk clients through mindful eating. I don’t call it intuitive eating. I call it informed intuitive eating, because there’s a version of intuitive eating that pulls you all the way away from tracking or journaling and slides into a diet culture backlash thought process… all diets are bad, so don’t track anything, just go by what your body needs. But what your body needs comes with so much other information attached to it. If you didn’t sleep well. If you’re low on protein or fiber or hydration. Your body is going to say other things through that same interoceptive signal, and those things get mixed into the feeling you’re having, whether you realize it or not.
So instead of pulling away from the data entirely, I want you to use some of it… some food awareness, some tracking, some of the other tangible pieces… so that you actually have an understanding of what’s true, and then you can compare that against what your interoception is telling you. That’s where the two thought processes join. That’s informed intuitive eating. Not just going by feel. Not just going by numbers. Reading both at the same time.
I feel chubby is information, an interoceptive signal firing off. I am chubby is a conclusion, and most of the time it’s the wrong one.
I want to be really clear about something here… I am not saying your feelings are lying to you. I am saying your feelings are giving you real information, and there is a possibility you’re reading that information incorrectly. Those are two very different things.
Here’s what I think actually happens, over and over, for so many of us. We feel something real. And in the split second after we feel it, we reach for an explanation… because an unexplained feeling is uncomfortable to sit in. And the explanation we grab first is almost never the most accurate one. It’s just the fastest one. The most familiar one. The one we’ve used before.
I’m lazy. I’m broken. I’m not built for this. This isn’t working. I’ll never get there.
None of those are data. They are stories. And they get told so quickly and so automatically that most people never even notice the moment they made the leap from feeling to fact.
Additional resources
- Your Body, Self-Image & Self-Criticism
- Always On My Mind Podcast: Work On Your Mind While You Work On Your Body
Where This Shows Up
Once you start looking for this, you’ll see it everywhere. A few of the ones I see most often…
- You feel chubby, big, or uncomfortable in your own skin, even though nothing about your body has actually changed since the last time you felt completely fine in it.
- It’s summer, and you feel sticky, puffy, or inflamed after a day outside in the heat and humidity, and your brain skips straight past the weather and lands on your body instead.
- You suddenly need to deep clean the pantry, rebuild your entire meal plan, or track every gram of food this week, when really something else in your life feels out of your hands and this is the one place you can go grab control back.
- You remember a season last year when you trained five days a week and felt incredible, and you decide that schedule is the answer again, without asking what else was actually true about your life back then… your sleep, your stress, your capacity, the people around you.
- You find yourself constantly available to help solve someone else’s problem before you’ve even looked at your own. Maybe that’s generosity. Or maybe their problem is just easier to fix than yours is.
- You cancel the thing you were looking forward to and feel relief instead of guilt, and you don’t stop to ask why.
- You go quiet in a way that other people read as calm, when really you’re somewhere between overwhelmed and shut down.
None of that means the feeling is wrong. It means the story you’re telling yourself about the feeling might be.
What To Do With It Instead
Before you let a feeling decide what it means about your body, your discipline, or who you are, ask yourself a few more questions first.
- What else might be true here, besides the first explanation I reached for?
- The last time I felt exactly like this, what was actually going on around me?
- Is this feeling really about the thing I think it’s about, or is it just easier to feel it here than it would be to feel it somewhere else?
- Do I have something I can actually check before I act on this feeling like it’s fact… my own version of the jeans?
You don’t need the full answer right away. You just need to stop treating your first guess as the truth before you’ve checked it against anything real.
Additional resources
A Final Thought
I still put the jeans on some weeks.
Not because I don’t trust myself anymore, but because I know how loud that old story can still get, and how much power it loses the moment I check it against something real.
Your feelings aren’t the enemy here.
They’re just not always telling you what you think they’re telling you.
With love, Coach Nik
