Maybe this is culture-dependent, but at least in my environment, people who do this don't make a conscious pause before the "1". For example, when I played hide

Maybe this is culture-dependent, but at least in my environment, people who do this don't make a conscious pause before the "1". For example, when I played hide-and-seek as a kid (and when I see kids playing now), the commonly accepted rule is that you can start running when the player who counts says "1". So you effectively have 9 "time units" to hide, not 10. Anyway, if you do make a conscious pause, I would argue that you are effectively counting from 0 even if you don't pronounce 0 due to the bias against that number caused by counting objects. The first pause needs to start somewhere, the start of that pause is in your mind (even if you don't pronounce it) and it corresponds to 0.