Gaining a new outlook on healthy eating and losing weight

This week I’ve been at my Eating Disorders rotation at The Elisa Project, which is an eating disorder awareness group in Dallas. This group was founded in the late 90’s by a father for his daughter, Elisa. She was in her 20’s when she took her life because she felt out of control over her eating disorder, anorexia. This organization now provides referrals and education to middle and high schools over how to recognize and prevent eating disorders.

 

I never had received much education about eating disorders in my school or internship until this rotation, and I have to admit I didn’t really know how I felt about them. I always felt like they were more of a psychological issue and that it wasn’t a dietitian’s scope of practice. Now that I’ve emersed myself in reading books provided to me about eating disorders this week, I’m starting to think differently.

 

The qualities of an eating disorder are:

 

• refusal to eat and denial of hunger
• an intense fear of gaining weight
• loss of muscle mass
• excessive exercise
• flat mood or lack of emotion
• irritability
• fear of eating in public
• preoccupation with food
• social withdrawal
• trouble sleeping
• dehydration

 

These are all serious, dangerous symptoms of the two most popular eating disorders, Anorexia and Bulimia.
But then I was thinking. These symptoms sound VERY similar to what occurs when someone is a chronic dieter, trying to lose weight:

 

• extreme low calorie diet restriction
• intense fear or anxiety of gaining weight / not losing enough weight
• loss of muscle mass
• use of diet “pills” or “aids”
• forcing oneself to exercise and feeling pain afterwards
• preoccupation with food
• social withdrawal/ anxiety

 

The characteristics are all so similar. Could this be why so many diets fail?  The restriction and guilt chronic dieters feel while on their diet probably feels very similar to what anorexics go through. The same pressure is behind both conditions: the desire to be at the “right” weight, what people think they should be at.

 

The societal pressure we all go through to look “perfect” is incorrect. We all have our right, healthy body weight that we should be at, low enough to prevent chronic diseases but not any lower than it should be for that. People forget that we all have very different body types, not one body weight is correct for all of us.

 

This pressure we all face for restriction needs to stop. The guilt after eating something off of our “plan” is enough to “ruin” the whole day. This guilt needs to stop. We need to learn how to listen to our bodies, to know when we are full and when to stop eating.

 

 

I’ve been reading a book called “Health at Every Size”, by Linda Bacon that basically talks about this same subject. She says that fat isnt the problem, dieting is. She talks about how to tune into your bodies own regulation system and how to find joy in movement (I like how she calls exercise “movement.” Takes the negative connotation away!)  You should check it out! I’ll probably keep posting about this topic, as its something that has really been on my mind lately.