While most of us know the signs of eating disorders, toxic eating habits that don’t fall under the definition of a specific disorder might be harder to notice, but can also have severe implications on someone’s physical and mental health. The National Eating Disorder Association describes disordered eating as a preoccupation with food, nutrition, and dieting which impedes your ability to eat normally, often presenting itself as a strictly regimented diet and feelings of guilt and shame attached to it.
While, they explain, these patterns and behaviors tend to be less severe than full-blown eating disorders, they can still cause serious health issues and in many cases may actually be a precursor to an eating disorder.
Recent studies have shown that eating disorders have spiked in the past several months, as quarantine and increasingly online work or school environments are leaving people home more often. This article from the New York Times explains how being in one place for long periods of time or being in isolation can make eating feel like a chore and create an unhealthy mindset.
Having a toxic relationship with food is woven so deeply into our culture’s mindset that some of these habits or thought patterns are thought of as normal or even funny.
I hear it all the time; people talk about missing meals or surviving solely on iced coffee in a way that makes it seem like it’s just a funny anecdote or a part of the college experience. It may seem like a harmless narrative, but this is the sort of thing that can set in and create a pattern of thinking where food is seen as optional. It might even make it seem like avoiding meals is a sign of working harder than everyone else.
Living on my own, without the structure of in-person classes to keep my schedule in check, I keep finding myself skipping meals, sometimes going up to twelve hours without eating, and while I’ve always considered myself someone who has a relatively stable relationship with my body image and with food, it’s scary how easy it is to fall into those habits.
Diet culture sets up this mindset that tells us that weight loss or nutrition are the goals of eating, and that anything we eat that doesn’t fit the parameters of that is unhealthy. Diet trends like keto or paleo, or even just a fixation on meal planning, continuously push that narrative that food is only acceptable if it is healthy.
But food is not something you need to earn.
Now don’t get me wrong, nutritional balance is something you should always strive for. There are foods that don’t carry as much nutritional value as others, or that should only be eaten in moderation, but that doesn’t mean they’re bad – and it certainly doesn’t mean you need to punish yourself for eating them.
Try to take a step back and really look at your relationship with food. You don’t need to spend your day thinking about what you eat or feeling guilty over food.