I don’t know if you read the post making the rounds about the new eating disorder: orthorexia.
Orthorexia is an obession with eating only foods that are considered healthy. Apparently, only eating healthy foods is a problem. I guess it’s time for a little bit of story time.
When we started the weight loss journey everything was super clean. No salt, no sauces, no resturant food but we did what worked for us. I think people thought we were going overboard at some points. I knew that, I didn’t need people to tell us that. Our biggest reason for going hard core on our diet like that was retrain our minds.
It’s like we had to start over from the beginning. We had to relearn portion size for starters because that worked hand in hand with moderation. We had to learn things we didn’t now like healthy fats and saturated fats. It was just part of the process.
It can be overwhelming and at some points there was total information overload. Like I said before, people probably thought I/we had an “unhealthy obsession” with eating healthy.
I think a lot of those diets are inherently valuable. The problem is that we have moralized eating, weight, food, and exercise. Food has become presented—more and more—as the answer.
The article mentions that social media is to blame for the pressure to eat healthy. People snap pictures of their healthy smoothies or meals. I know I post pictures of my meal prepping all the time. People know that we’ve lost weight and want to know what we did. People want to follow our examples and social media is a way to see inside of our lives. I can understand how a person can get wrapped up in this.
There is a lot of pressure to be healthy, right? It’s put in our face every day. I’ve never been put in a situation where I’ve felt uneasy about not eating healthy foods. During the journey, things got easier. It wasn’t a diet, it was a lifestyle change. And I’ve said this many times before, the things I once desired weren’t desirable for me anymore.
That being said, I think everyone is different which means everyone has a different process. I can see how people could fall into a pattern of only focusing on what is healthy and not. I could see how people could feel the pressure to always eat healthy food. But for some reason one thing keeps coming to mind, if you’re living a healthy life why would you feel guilty for eating something “not to healthy” every once and awhile?
Isn’t this really all about the 80/20 rule? Tell me what you think!
