When Your Diet is Disordered Eating: 15 Warning Signs
How healthy is your healthy lifestyle?
Children internalize what they hear from the adults around them. Growing up, I learned quickly that “fat” was a bad thing and was somehow negatively associated with personal character. No one spelled it out. They didn’t have to. Instead, they just talked about other people’s weight gain in derogatory terms, shamed their own bodies, and endlessly discussed diets, exercise, and weight.
At the time, I was a child who was often called “skinny.” I hated the word. It was never said with admiration. It was a criticism of my body and was often accompanied by suggestions that I should eat a sandwich or questions about whether or not I had an eating disorder. Later, when I put on weight in my twenties, I would get other questions shaming my body for changing and acquiring more weight.
For a long time, I had an unhealthy relationship with my own body. While I was typically athletic, exercise became a form of punishment — something I had to do, not something I got to do. Nutrition usually revolved around weight perceptions. I labeled some foods as “good” and others as “bad” and experienced guilt about what I ate.
