people are sooo against eating disorders until they take away the names and switch it to “dieting” or “health tips”
like ohh you don’t support eating disorders and think they’re terribly tragic? then why are you constantly talking about how you eat too much? why do you separate foods into categories like “guilty pleasures” and “guilt free treats”? why do you insist that the ultimate healthy diet is eating less and working out more? why do you think you have to work out a lot more if you ate something “"bad”“
why are eating disorders only bad if we’re being hospitalized, but if we’re drastically losing weight and dont have a diagnosis we’re “doing great”
why did i have to hear more and more compliments about my weight loss than people concerned because i was getting weaker and becoming even more tired than usual? why did people make me want to go back to starving myself because i want the compliments that they gave me when i was rapidly losing weight?
eating disorders are only seen in a bad light when people are either dead or dying, but if we’re just getting skinnier it doesn’t matter how we lost the weight- we’re seen as a success story because we turned out thin and thats what really matters right? being thin? thats the only goddamn important thing in this world
Multiply this by a thousand if you’re fat.
Most of “dieting culture” is actually deeply rooted in orthorexia, an obsession with only eating “pure” and “healthy” foods in controlled amounts. It’s currently not classed as an eating disorder in itself, but rather a symptom of disordered eating behavior that goes hand in hand with anorexia or bulimia.
It’s an obsession with eating only “the right foods” or a perception of “healthy, pure foods” and having “cleanse” days and “detoxing” when you slip up and eat either the wrong food or too much of something. Now, tell me that doesn’t sound like something you might read under Cosmo’s “top ten tips to lose belly fat for summer”, or hell, literally any health vlogger on youtube with thousands of subscribers claiming they cured their depression/cancer by doing the banana cleanse, which yes, is actually a real thing. Don’t do it. Please. Love yourselves.
A UK based study (can’t find it right now but I will add it in if I can) on eating disorders noted that those most likely to suffer from the symptoms of orthorexia are people who think they are “just dieting” or trying to be really healthy by following popular “pure” food movements like veganism and paleo, but to unhealthy extremes. Usually because they’ve been suckered in by popular food vloggers who argue violently against the validity of the term, or the notion you can ever eat “too healthily”, despite the term being coined by Dr Steven Bratman back in 1996, a physician well known for being an advocate for safe, alternative medicines and therapies for better health—so not just a “western physician” ragging on “pure alternatives” like a lot of these diet frauds claim.
Eating healthily is not about deprivation. The human body needs fat, it needs carbohydrates, it needs salt, and a whole host of other things people will try to convince you you need to eat 0 of, in order to be healthy.
Most of you know I got super sick at the start of the year from an horrendous virus that meant I couldn’t eat solids for almost six weeks, I lost a lot of weight very quickly, over 20lbs. And while I’ve managed to gain some of that back as I’ve gradually been able to increase my food intake (I am now up to roughly 1200 calories a day which is still too low for my size and age, but much better than the 200 I was living on for over a month) I’m still suffering the side effects of being forced to eat nothing but organic oatmeal and bone broth for all those weeks, including but not limited to hair loss, broken nails, skin that looks like absolute shit, and not to even mention the mental and physical fatigue I’m still suffering from over six months later.
And don’t get me wrong, I was eating healthy foods, I was enduring the “detox” dream so many magazines and health vloggers rave about. But the truth of it is, healthy humans aren’t made to live on those things alone, (and that’s not actually how the body detoxes itself, but that’s another rant for another time)—regardless of how healthy those things are.
You need to eat.
You are allowed to eat.
Fuck these disordered ideas of societal norms. You can be healthy and happy and worthy, without being thin.
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