National Eating Disorder Awareness Week

February 21-27, 2022

Eating disorders are much more common than many people realize. According to the National Eating Disorder Association, 28.8 million people experience an eating disorder at some point in their life and numbers continue to rise following the covid-19 pandemic.

It is important to recognize that eating disorders can take a variety of forms. Many times you may not even be able recognize that someone is struggling. Individuals with eating disorders are not only the super tiny individuals, or those people that spend all of their time exercising to overcompensate for the food they eat.

Eating disorders can come about very easily, especially now more than ever. One very influential factor that encourages behaviors that lead to eating disorders is social media. You see countless posts of people with the "perfect body" ingraining into our minds that that is what we are supposed to look like. Instead of eating for appearance we should focus our energy on eating for health.

In addition to social media posts, there are so many FAD diets circulating our culture today promising fast and long lasting weight loss. Truth is, almost all of these diets have a lack of scientific evidence and support. While these diets may be effective for some individuals, long lasting health benefits can be few and far between.

In my opinion, one of the biggest issues with these diets is that most of them are what we call "elimination diets" meaning you are completely removing certain things from your diet. In some cases elimination diets are necessary, but should likely be discussed with a medical professional to determine if it is the best choice for you. Unless deemed necessary, elimination diets can be dangerous because your body can become sensitive to the things that were eliminated. Thus, when reincorporating these things back into your diet you may experience a lot of trouble.

Additionally, elimination diets can have a spiral effect. This meaning that many times people will eliminate one thing and feel good about doing so, then they will eliminate something else from their diet and so on until eventually they have set very strict eating restrictions causing them to miss out on essential components of their diet.

The most important thing we can do is be our own ally and be supportive of ourselves and others . Speaking positively to ourselves is very beneficial, and it is important to understand that it is not uncommon to struggle with an eating disorder. We can help ourselves and others by taking small steps to create a healthy relationship with food and exercise.

Below is a graphic created by NEDA