From Getting Healthy to Disordered Eating

There’s often a fine line between wanting to be healthier and adopting disordered eating or exercise behaviors. In fact, some disordered patterns have become normalized in our culture, making it tricky to know when you need to seek help. 

In today’s blog post, let’s consider some examples of when getting healthy turns into disordered eating. 

Dietitian Elaina Efird, RDN, CD, CEDRD, CSSD reveals that the biggest question to ask yourself is how your new eating and/or exercise behaviors are impacting your life. Are you obsessing over food? Are you focusing so much on eating or exercise that you can’t enjoy your life? “That’s when it leads to disordered eating,” Elaina explains. 

Disordered eating often presents itself in one of four ways.

1. Logging food

Many people begin logging their food when they want to change their nutrition habits. They may want to see how many total calories they’re eating each day or better understand their protein, fat, and carbohydrate ratio. This behavior turns to disordered when:

• You don’t eat out at a restaurant or a friend’s house because you don’t know how to log your meal.

• You’re very rigid about your total caloric intake and panic if you go over a certain number. You may even compensate with exercise to “make up” for your overage.

• You skip meals to fit your intake into a set number of calories. For instance, you may not eat breakfast or lunch because you plan to eat out for dinner and want to ensure that you have enough calories left to log.

Logging food should help you; it gives you accountability and allows you to keep some consistency with your daily intake. It shouldn’t be something you obsess over though. “There always needs to be room for flexibility,” Elaina reminds us. “It’s perfectly normal not to eat the exact same number of calories every day.”

2. Exercise

Although it’s not eating, exercise can also become very disordered. It’s okay to adopt an exercise routine or even add more exercise into your weekly schedule. However, it becomes a problem if it begins to negatively affect your life. Consider the following questions:

• If something unexpected comes up, do you feel stressed because you missed a workout? 

• Do you exercise extra hard the next day to make up for a missed workout? 

• Do you exercise when you’re sick or injured because you can’t bear to skip a day? 

In these instances, the focus of exercise becomes disordered and obsessive rather than about bettering your physical and mental health. 

3. Eating more “healthy” foods

Again, this eating pattern becomes disordered when it becomes too rigid. Let’s say you’re trying to incorporate more vegetables into your diet. “The issue arises when you have no flexibility to enjoy other foods,” Elaina explains. If dessert is served and you say no because you think it’s “bad” for you or because it will make you gain weight, that’s a problem. Remember: There’s room for sweets and desserts in life!

4. Avoiding sugar

This habit is often a gray area when it comes to disordered eating and can even be a point of contention. A lot of people believe it’s okay to cut out all processed sugar. “That’s disordered,” Elaina shares. “Cutting out an entire food group or category leaves no room for flexibility.” It is realistic to sometimes have sugar! 

To close, wondering when getting healthy turns into disordered eating is a really common question. 

As we touched on above, the common theme is rigidity versus flexibility. Ultimately, it’s important to find balance when trying to eat healthier. 

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