Carlos Solis
Healthy eating can lower your risk of type 2 diabetes, heart disease, and some cancers — and it can also help protect against depression and other mental-health problems. But for some people, eating only what’s considered “right” can become an obsessive idea, and social media can make that obsession worse.
A worrying trend
Healthy eating has exploded on social media, where many posts recommend consuming only “healthy” foods. Most of those messages come from wellness influencers rather than doctors or other medical professionals.
The basic idea of healthy eating isn’t harmful on its own. The problem appears when a person’s habits lock into strict rules and those rules become tied to their self-esteem. People who strictly follow that approach often feel anxious or guilty when they eat something considered “unhealthy.”
Eating disorders
An eating disorder is a clinically recognized mental illness that persistently and negatively alters a person’s eating behavior and the thoughts tied to food, body weight, or body shape.
Those disorders can include skipping meals, strictly following extreme diets, binge eating, compulsive exercise, worrying about how the body looks, and an intense preoccupation with food.
Eating disorders can seriously damage physical and mental health, and in some cases they can be life-threatening. Examples include anorexia nervosa, bulimia nervosa, binge-eating disorder, and avoidant/restrictive food intake disorder.
Orthorexia nervosa — an excessive fixation on eating only “healthy” foods — isn’t officially recognized yet, but the pattern resembles other clinical eating disorders.
When healthy eating goes too far
These behaviors can signal an unhealthy relationship with food and eating:
- People create increasingly strict rules about food, labeling certain items as “good” or “bad.”
- People feel anxious or guilty when they eat “bad” foods, especially when that guilt reflects their self-esteem.
- People avoid social events, especially ones centered on food, because they fear breaking their rules.
- People spend excessive time thinking about, planning, or researching food.
- People do not enjoy eating; they experience stress and restriction instead.
Psychologists say healthy eating becomes harmful when it turns into an obsessive focus on eating only “the right” foods.
Based on material from The Conversation
