Food and diet is an area of great distress for many people, mainly due to the fact that people equate controlling our intake of food with controlling how we can make our bodies look. As humans, we have a desire to consistently improve ourselves, which is typically an amazing and very useful ability as this is what pushes us to do great things, but when we have the belief that skinner = greater or leaner = greater or indeed healthier = greater, this is where our relationship with food can become toxic. Society and the media love to push the idea that you should love yourself and you are perfect the way you are while simultaneously giving us confusing and ever changing views on what is desirable in a body. In recent years we have jumped from super skinny to curvy with a small waist to incredibly muscly, with all these body types having one thing in common: they are all quite difficult, and can often even be impossible, to obtain . In this post, I am going to discuss a few things that can cause us to have a poor relationship with food and diet and why chasing that ideal body is often fruitless.
What Can Cause Us To Have A Toxic Relationship With Food?
The Media
In my experience, a major cause of developing a toxic relationship with food is social media, as well as the media in general. I find it incredibly irritating and sometimes even harmful scrolling through social media and seeing one post talking about how you are perfect just the way you are and how you should love yourself no matter how you look followed by a photoshopped influencer promoting “weightloss teas!” (which are usually just glorified laxatives by the way), followed by my favourite meme accounts advertising “Sarah’s Discovery”. I don’t know if anyone has ever seen this but it’s a weightloss scam pushing diet pills and advertising fake before and after pictures of a woman with a dramatic weight loss apparently taken 10 days apart. There was a period where I saw Sarah’s Discovery advertised daily on Instagram and it started to annoy me so much I started reporting it for abuse which is something I wouldn’t usually do but I just found it so irritating.
Many individuals on the internet like to prey on our unhappiness with ourselves as it is an easy way to get clicks and money. Bodyweight happens to be something that makes many people unhappy so people will use this to their advantage to sell a product or idea, usually with little evidence supporting its legitimacy as a helpful tool for weightloss. The media is often guilty for exploiting this insecurity too, in particular the tabloids. Often times I’ll find myself on The Daily Mail’s snapchat page where they will regularly obsess over peoples bodies. Remember when Adele lost a significant amount of weight? There was a constant coverage of her just going about her business, maybe going for a stroll, doing the shopping where the tabloids captioned all the pictures of her “Adele shows off her 7 stone weight loss,” as if she wasn’t just doing everyday things that she would have been doing regardless of her weight. They’ll push the narrative that these celebrities have a secret for dramatic weightloss and we’ll keep going back reading their articles hoping to find out that secret as if she didn’t just progressively alter her lifestyle.
Seneca said “It is not the man who has too little, but the man who craves more, that is poor”. The media is essentially trying to tell us that we are missing something important, that important thing being the desirable body of the day which, when we accept this to be the case, makes us more likely to pay attention to everything they have to say about bodies and fitness and food and health. By convincing us that we are lacking, or poor, the media can make us desperate to obtain what we are missing, in this case the “perfect body”. This can cause us to obsess over our bodies and what we can do to be considered more desirable which usually comes down to diet and food. Alter your food intake and you alter your body is what we can end up living by to the extreme which is incredibly unhealthy and often does not foster the desired outcome.
Control
We live in an incredibly fast paced society, where hard work and stress is often praised and perceived laziness and passiveness is seen as deplorable. This mindset of constantly being wired and switched on can leave us feeling anxious, exhausted and desperate for control over our own lives. We often feel like work or school needs to be prioritised over me-time and we can’t relax until all our work is done. It isn’t uncommon for me to receive college emails at 12am at night which in my mind is crazy like please relax! This lack of control over our own lives can leave us desperately in search of some morsel of control that we can still hold on to, something certain. For a lot of people this is food. I have had a friend come to me on multiple occasions telling me that when she feels really anxious, food is like a safety blanket. For her this can come in the form of binging or in barely eating at all. She can binge on comfort food and then feel incredibly guilty and barely eat at all the next day or she can barely eat at all and feel as though she is in control of her diet. When she is eating less she feels like she at least appears to look good and put together to the world, when inside she feels like she’s crumbling under the pressure of everything. This of course also arises out of society’s emphasis on always being put together and that feeling bad or being imperfect is a failure of some sort. I can say for myself at least that although I know on a level that perfection is impossible and failure isn’t the end of the world, I often feel as though these things aren’t an option and I must always be at the top of my game, which of course causes a lot of stress and anxiety. Often fostering a better relationship with diet and food can involve learning to slow down and being willing to give up control in certain situations. We must acknowledge that complete control is often an illusion. Afterall, you can try really hard at something, put all the hours in and make many sacrifices and still end up failing because although we can increase the probability of a good outcome occuring, we can’t guarantee it. In terms of food, we can follow a strict diet and work out 6 days a week but this still doesn’t necessarily mean we can look like Kim Kardashian, even if we followed her routine exactly. At the end of the day, acceptance of who you are exactly the way you are as well as your situation in life is most important. We can work to change how we look and change our situation but accepting things the way they are for the moment and accepting the fact that we may not achieve exactly what we would like no matter how hard we work, is often essential to letting go of our stress and anxiety.
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