3 Normalized Eating Behaviours That Can Actually Be Problematic
Did you know that your health is affected not only by what you eat but also how you eat? This includes your relationship with and your perception of food as well.
Unfortunately, it keeps getting harder and harder to differentiate healthy and unhealthy eating behaviours, especially since the society we’ve built and diet culture work hard to normalize these behaviours. Making sense of the information on the Internet has become a daunting and almost impossible task.
Here are just 3 (of the many) eating behaviours I’ve observed that seem common or normal, but can actually be quite problematic:
Trying to suppress or ignore hunger by any means necessary
We’re all born with hunger and fullness queues. Imagine trying to soothe a hungry and crying baby. You can try anything, but the only way you’ll be able to soothe it is by feeding it.
Our body sends us hunger signals for a reason: it needs energy. And the unit of measurement is calories (the same way we measure distance in meters, or weight in kilos). Though as adults we won’t wail like a baby does when we’re hungry, but trying to willingly or unwillingly suppress our appetite can lead to issues on the shorter and longer term.
On the short term, one of the things that can happen when we ignore our appetite (even though it feels like it goes away when we do ignore it), is that it’ll come back stronger, usually in the form of intense cravings or a binge. This is a normal reaction your body has to compensate for what it doesn’t get enough earlier in the day. This can make us feel like we are out of control around food, therefore creating certain fear or anxiety around certain foods.
On the longer term, ignoring or suppressing our appetite can lead to completely disconnecting from our hunger signals. Either our body will send them and we won’t recognize them as hunger, or it’ll just stop sending us the hunger signals altogether since they’ve been ignored for so long. This can lead to not really knowing when we’re hungry, eating for the sole purpose of eating, but also losing any pleasure associated to eating food. Eating will start to feel like a chore, and given that we do kind of have to eat for good health and survival, losing pleasure for something you have to do so often can lead to general dissatisfaction towards life, too.
Categorizing foods as “good” or “bad”
This is a mindset that can be more or less difficult to break and rebuild, as doing so requires working completely different mental muscles, not to mention how uncomfortable the process can be.
Here’s a different perspective: all (yes, all) foods fit in a balanced and healthy diet. Are some more nutritionally dense (in vitamins, for example) than others? Sure! But I don’t eat birthday cake for the vitamin content necessarily. I eat it in mostly social settings, to celebrate someone’s birthday. The same goes for every single other food.
The reason why seeing foods as “good” OR “bad” without leaving any room for a gray area, is that it creates unnecessary guilt or shame when we eventually do end up eating (or sometimes even bingeing on) the foods we perceive as “bad”. The stress we feel when eating these foods can actually be more harmful to your health than enjoying a reasonable amount of the food mindfully, and moving on, especially if this causes more chronic mental stress.
Instead of believing that eating a single food item once will significantly affect our health (it likely won’t if we are otherwise healthy), let’s try zooming out and looking at the bigger picture, as your overall diet and lifestyle habits are what have a greater impact on your health.
Using exercise only to “burn calories”
The benefits of exercise go far beyond just burning calories. Do we burn calories when we exercise? Sure! Does exercise make us feel good? Not always, but it should!
This last behaviour can become problematic when we continuously do exercise we don’t necessarily enjoy with the sole purpose of burning calories or controlling our physical appearance. This can lead to the development of body dysmorphia (where our perception of our body is different than what it looks like in reality). This causes us to have a negative relationship with exercise, start to dread doing it. We’ll either eventually “give up” on exercise altogether, or keep pushing so far that it could make us sick.
A better alternative would be to acknowledge all the positive benefits of exercise other than just burning calories, and choosing movement that you enjoy and that actually makes you feel good, so that you’ll be able to do it consistently long term.
