The grey area between a diet and an eating disorder

Music.

I'm going to ask you to imagine in front of you is a pie chart. If you're at home and you've got time, you might actually want to draw this out. It's a useful exercise. What I want you to do is divide that pie chart into segments that is basically everything that defines who you are. So what percentage of importance, for instance, does family have in your life? What about friends? What about socializing? How about work or study? What segment would you give for travel or hobbies?

And kind of divide up the whole pie chart into what defines you, who you are as a person, and what proportion of each of those things you believe define you. Are you someone that's maybe 80% defined by the work that you do, you know, that it also happens to be your passion and that's where a lot of your friends are? Are you someone that's a social butterfly? So socialising is really important for you. That would be a big slice of that pie.

Now, once you've done that, once you've attributed all the different things to all the different areas of your life that make you happy and define who you are, what I want you to do is look at the dot in the middle. And what we're going to draw around the middle is a circle. Now, this will depend on you. This circle may be a big circle or it may be a very small one. But what that circle represents is the amount of time that you spend thinking about food.

Thinking about weight loss, thinking about how you want your body to be different, different what you're going to try next what book you've heard of that provides the answer to a smaller body and try and imagine how big if you had to proportion the amount of time in your day you spend thinking about that stuff how big would that dot be how much of that space would it take up now you might say well it's quite a small dot maybe 10 that's hardly anything you know that's a a fairly

small kind of circle in the middle of your pie chart. But think of a few statistics, and these are really boring statistics, so I've done them for you. And I'll say straight up, I'm not a statistic person at all. But let's just say we live to 80, averagely. And I'm going to assume that you didn't come out of the womb worrying about your body. So let's say you started to worry about your body and wanted weight loss and began to picture a smaller you from, say, about the age of 15.

So that leaves us with 65 years. I'm going to give you time off for sleep. I'm presuming you don't dream about this stuff, but maybe you do. Who knows? But no, I'm going to give you a full eight hours off for sleep, which basically leaves 16 hours per day, potentially, that you could be thinking about this stuff.

Let's just say if I'm giving you time off for the sleep, that means you spend out of your 65 years of potentially thinking about this, you will spend about 43 and a half years of that actually awake. So even if you just spent 10% of your time thinking about this stuff, 4.35 years is taken away from that time with people that you love. 4.35 years is taken away from the study. You could get a degree in that time, a whole degree in the time it takes you to think about this stuff.

Even if you just want to spend that time relaxing, you've missed out on 4.35 years of complete relaxation because of the time that you're thinking about this. So ask yourself, even if it is 10%, which only seems like a tiny fraction of our day, but what if the circle that you've drawn is bigger? What if your circle is 20% or 30%? Then you've really got to say to yourself, how much time in the rest of your life are you willing to lose in the pursuit of that smaller body?

It's a big question because we do, we waste a lot of time on this.

There's a certain type of person that would fall into the category of having a great big circle in the middle of their pie chart and that is someone with orthorexia orthorexia won't be found in any diagnostic manual for eating disorders it's not in there but but in the eating disorder community it's fairly well recognized as that area between dieting or attending to your health and perhaps losing a little bit of weight, and anorexia.

So there's this whole kind of grey area in between those two things. Orthorexia actually means correct appetite. So that's exactly what we're talking about. This concentration or focus on eating correctly, and that can take lots and lots of different forms. For some people, it's about the purity of their food. They have to have organic food or they have to eat raw food or they only have to eat vegan food or vegetarian food.

And before I get anyone screaming at me about veganism or vegetarianism, there's a whole group of people that fall under those categories that become vegetarians or become vegans for very good reason. They have animal welfare as their focus, and they believe strongly that it's not right to eat animal products or it's not right to eat meat.

That's quite different to somebody who uses those titles as a reason to eliminate entire food groups from their diet and we see a lot of this in eating disorders people who say well I'm going to become a vegetarian and they have no real concerns particularly about animal welfare they might say that they do because it's a great cover-up in order to legitimize the exclusion of an entire food group from their diet. And what will often happen as a result is that they will lose a bit of weight.

And what it does, it kind of throws people off the scent because they go, oh, that person's gone vegetarian recently. That's why they've lost weight. When often, vegetarianism and veganism can actually be a cover for an eating disorder. As I say, not for everybody. If you do this because you have those concerns, then that's absolutely fair enough. However, there's a large group of people that do this for a very specific reason.

And sometimes, depending on how far we take all these ideals, it could fall into this category of orthorexia. So what makes the difference between you clean eating or wanting to eat organic food and it becoming an eating disorder? Well, it's probably down to the emotional turmoil if those rules are broken.

If you cannot source organic food to eat, if you find yourself somewhere where you can't find raw food or you can't find vegan food, and if that brings about some big emotional turmoil, so stress and anxiety or shame or guilt, then you're probably looking at okay is this actually turning into an eating disorder also if you are skipping parts of your life because of this so for instance if you're skipping social events because you know that

they're likely to be serving meat or you know that perhaps the kitchen is serving meat products even though you don't intend to eat any yourself or you're aware that that they don't serve organic food, for instance, or they're doing something which falls outside of your very, very strict set of rules. If you find you're avoidant of situations because of your way of eating, again, could that fall under the orthorexia banner?

And sometimes orthorexia is a bit of a gateway into anorexia. It's what people do at the beginning when dieting becomes something more than dieting. It becomes something a bit more sinister. And the problem is here is that from an outsider, you notice someone lose a bit of weight and quite often it's awful. And I really discourage you to do this, but people will jump up and go, wow, look at you, you've lost weight and make a big, big fuss about it.

They will congratulate that person. They will say things like, you're looking really well, What are you doing? And they will often reply, well, I'm taking care of my health. It's my year of health. I'm doing good things for myself. And they get applauded and they get congratulated. And it's a good thing. But that can kind of tip over into orthorexia.

This can tip over into that person needing congratulations, needing support, needing that thrill of the weight loss every week and going to more and more extreme behaviours to obtain that end. So we can move through orthorexia, which is the grey area, into anorexia. So those people that were congratulating us before are now saying things like, oh, you're looking really thin. I've never seen you look this small. Or are you sure you're OK? Have you been ill?

Are you eating well? And they're starting to express concerns about your health, etc. And then we get into anorexia, which is a whole different ballgame. And that's very scary territory to be in.

So sometimes this is a gateway into anorexia. And sometimes for someone that's had anorexia, this is almost what recovery looks like. Sometimes people with anorexia never really recover fully and have that kind of relaxed and balanced relationship with food. Sometimes there's always anxiety around food. There's always particular care taken and there's always food rules.

But if that person has regained a healthy amount of weight and from a health perspective, they're stable and especially from a mental health perspective, they're coping well with everyday life, they're socializing and their life is full, then having a few food rules, etc., is still what we would class as recovery.

I believe that one of the big problems with orthorexia is that it's been very normalized. When someone tells you they're on a keto diet or they're clean eating or they're intermittent fasting, instead of us as a society saying, why? Why would you want to do that? Why would you mess around with your food intake? take? Why would you count your carbs or count your macros or count your calories? Why? Why would you do that?

Instead of that reaction of bewilderment and disbelief, we ask more questions. We say, well, that's great. Tell us all about it. How much weight have you lost? How are you doing? What book are you following? And we normalize this as being behavior that we want to mimic as well. And that's the problem is that this goes from normality.

And at what point does normality become something abnormal or maladaptive? When does that happen? And this whole gray area of orthorexia means that that could happen anywhere between going on a diet and having anorexia. There's a very, very fine line in between those two things where something is so congratulated and lauded, the fact that you've done so well and you've lost some weight, to the point where people suddenly go, oh, are they taking it a little bit too seriously?

Have they lost a little bit too much weight? What's actually going on? So I suppose, what do you think about this?

How do you want to live your life? Think of the time involved in doing all this and following these rules. How much are we confusing thinner with healthier? Because the two are not intrinsically linked. I have lots of people coming to me that say, I'm not fussed about weight loss. I just want to be healthy. And then I reply, well, okay, if we could assure you that you are absolutely healthy. In top form, in top health, at this moment, at this time, at the weight you

are, are you telling me that that's it? You're done. You don't need to change your weight. And then they seem to go, ah, well, no, no, I want to drop a few kilos as well. And then you have to ask, well, it's not about health then, is it? It's about weight loss. And we're confusing the two. We're led to believe that healthy people are thin people. And that is not necessarily the case. Because one big thing we ignore when we make that statement is what about our mental health?

Can you see somebody's mental health? How do you know that that thin person who's lost a lot of weight, how do you know what they've done to get there? And what methods they've taken and what behaviors they've have had to indulge in on a day-to-day basis in order to achieve that weight loss. The thing is about weight is that everybody can get ill. You can get ill when you weigh 60 kilos. You can get ill when you weigh 160 kilos. Everybody can get injured. Eating right will not stop any of this.

It will not necessarily make you live longer. And if your attention to food rules are such that you you are excluding people in your life in order to eat a certain way. You have to ask if it robs you of a social connection, is it worth it? Thank you so much for your company today. I would also love it if you could follow this podcast. It really does mean a lot to me. Also, we have a six-week online Change Your Relationship with Food course that

you can take. Just visit www.acfeb.com and click on the ACFEB and me courses link. There's also a journal and a workbook available on Amazon and you'll find that link in our bio. I really hope you can join me again next week. Goodbye. Music.