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 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, when discussed, usually revolved around weight perceptions. I labeled some foods as “good” and others as “bad” and experienced guilt about what I ate.
Disordered Eating vs. Eating Disorders
It would be years before I would learn about disordered eating and how it doesn’t always gain the classification of an eating disorder. It’s more common than I ever realized, and it teeters dangerously on the edge of the diagnostic criteria for eating disorders like anorexia nervosa, bulimia nervosa, and binge eating to name a few.
It’s unhealthy, but it might not qualify as a disorder. It is a health concern whether or not it earns a diagnosis. The health consequences of disordered eating include bone loss, gastrointestinal distress, low heart rate, poor sleep quality, headaches, muscle cramps, fatigue, nutritional deficiencies, low blood pressure, fluid imbalance, electrolyte imbalance, depression, social isolation, anxiety, and more.
The key difference between an eating disorder and disordered eating is that eating disorders are life-threatening. The Emily Program, a University of Minnesota Medical School Affiliate, identifies the following tipping points from disordered eating to eating disorder (the tipping points are in bold).
There are many warning signs of disordered eating. Many diets and other lifestyle habits qualify. These signs could indicate the potential for health complications, but they also point to challenges with mental health.
Frequent dieting, including yo-yo dieting
Associating food with guilt and shame
Skipping meals or undereating
Chronic weight fluctuation
Compulsive eating habits or overeating
Using food as a reward for exercise
Using food restrictions to compensate for foods consumed
Participation in fad diets
Focusing social media on diet, weight loss, or food
Significant calorie and/or food restrictions, which can include vegan and vegetarian diets in some cases
Weight measures negatively impact mood
Taking diet pills or diet injections
Misusing supplements for weight loss
Cleansing or fasting
Heightened focus on appearance and weight
The Journal of the American Medical Association Pediatrics found that 22% of children and adolescents worldwide have disordered eating. It was found that risk increased with gender (girls had a higher rate of disordered eating compared to boys), age, and body mass index. It’s also likely that boys, LGBTQ+ members, people of color, and those with larger body mass can be severely underdiagnosed with disordered eating.
Even though these behaviors do not qualify at present for an eating disorder diagnosis, they do represent a health crisis that needs immediate attention. Disordered eating can contribute to early death, and it can also increase the risk of mental health disorders.
How to Recover from Disordered Eating
Disordered eating is far more prevalent than we realize. A quick scroll through social media will show many accounts focused on diet, exercise, weight loss, and appearance. Even though disordered eating is considered less life-threatening than eating disorders, it still has a major health impact. The following are ways to recover from disordered eating.
Ask for Help
Therapeutic intervention can help with disordered eating recovery. Some of the most common forms of therapy are Acceptance and Commitment Therapy (ACT), Cognitive Behavioral Therapy (CBT), and Dialectical Behavior Therapy (DBT). Each of these treatments focuses on changing thoughts and behaviors.
ACT: Acceptance and Commitment Therapy focuses on helping individuals accept their thoughts and feelings while actively changing their behaviors to better align with their values.
CBT: Cognitive Behavioral Therapy is a primary treatment for disordered eating as well as many other mental health conditions. In CBT, individuals learn to become aware of their thoughts and how these thoughts influence behavior. The work of CBT is to learn how to be in control of one’s thoughts and behaviors instead of being at their mercy.
DBT: Dialectical Behavior Therapy is focused on mindfulness, emotion regulation, and learning to develop stronger coping skills for addressing discomfort.
Although these treatment strategies are proven effective, other therapeutic approaches can help. Eye movement desensitization and reprocessing (EMDR) is an effective trauma treatment and can help those recovering from disordered eating. Other alternative therapies like reiki, hypnosis, or meditation can also support recovery. What’s most important is to find a therapist and therapeutic style that works best for the individual in recovery.
Yoga for Body/Mind Integration
Although yoga isn’t one of the most common treatments for disordered eating, it can help. It has proven to be useful in treating eating disorders by increasing body awareness. I’m a certified yoga instructor and can attest to the fact that yoga’s core principles can help individuals build a healthier body/mind connection. Learning to be aware and mindfully present in the body, to accept but quiet thoughts, and to prioritize self-care are all healthy components of a disordered eating recovery plan.
Yoga isn’t strictly an exercise regimen. Rather, it’s a spiritual practice that focuses on self-compassion, presence, meditation, and listening to the body. Many people with disordered eating may have life trauma that has caused them to dissociate from their bodies, and yoga can help them learn to safely become present with their bodies.
With that being said, choosing the right yoga class is important. Here are some guidelines for choosing a healthy yoga class for your disordered eating recovery.
Avoid classes that treat yoga strictly as a physical exercise practice. These studios can promote perfection, competition, and unhealthy body standards, which can be triggering and problematic for those with disordered eating. These “yoga instructors” are also failing to teach actual yoga if they are purely focusing on fitness in their practice.
Find a trauma-informed yoga instructor who is trained to work with and be sensitive to trauma survivors. Many trauma-informed instructors will not touch you without direct permission and will also have non-verbal ways for you to communicate that you prefer not to be touched during class even in help with a pose.
Choose a beginner’s class or a restorative yoga class. Gentle or slow-flow yoga classes are also good options as they are not vigorous or physically demanding. These classes are more inclusive for those who are recovering from disordered eating.
Avoid yoga classes filled with mirrors. This could create body image awareness rather than a focus on the body/mind connection.
Take a class that offers supportive props for a more inclusive practice. Use straps, bolsters, blocks, and even chairs to help accommodate the body during a yoga practice. Any yoga instructor who treats props as undesirable is failing to correctly teach yoga. Props are tools used to help students maintain healthy alignment in poses and can enhance any yoga practice.
Find inclusive classes. The best yoga classes accommodate all bodies despite differing abilities, race, gender, size, or sexual orientation. They are accepting and welcoming of all participants and offer modifications for all body types and abilities.
Shift the Focus
Another aspect of recovering from disordered eating is to begin to make changes in everyday life to shift the focus away from diet culture, fitness fads, and weight measures. Making healthier choices isn’t just about developing healthy habits regarding nutrition and movement. It’s also important to begin eliminating unhealthy influences in our lives.
Changing the social media accounts we follow is a start. Removing accounts that are hyperfocused on weight, fitness, and diet can help. It can also be helpful to start following accounts that promote body acceptance, self-compassion, and healthier habits. If we want to change our behavior, we need to remove toxic influences and begin focusing on healthier ones.
That also means changing our social media and shifting away from weight, diet culture, and a focus on fitness. We need to ask ourselves if the content we’re providing would help or hurt someone else’s disordered eating recovery. Beginning to shift the culture away from toxic measures of health starts at an individual level.
We also may need to evaluate the nature of our interpersonal relationships. Are the conversations we’re having focused on health or only on appearance? Do we refer to exercise as a painful punishment and food as a reward? Beginning to evaluate the way we think and speak about health can help us tune into the negative messages we’ve absorbed and are putting out into the world. It’s time to change the conversation.
Disordered Eating, Diet Culture, and You
Exercise isn’t meant to be something we have to do. It’s something we get to do to strengthen and care for our bodies. It can even be fun, depending on what we choose.
Nutrition isn’t meant to be focused on caloric intake or carbs. Rather, it’s a way to nourish our bodies and minds by providing healthy nutrients. We’re labeling food as “good” or “bad”, creating judgment around how we nourish ourselves. While there are certainly foods that are more or less healthy than others, disordered eating tends to hyperfocus on the guilt and shame surrounding food — or in the opposite extreme, moral superiority resulting from eating behaviors.
I see examples of disordered eating nearly every day. It’s an epidemic that is so thoroughly incorporated into our lives that we don’t always see just how insidious it is — or how much it’s harming bodies and minds. But our children see it. With 22% or more of them already showing disordered eating patterns, we can be sure that how we speak or act when it comes to food and exercise impacts the people around us. If we’re not promoting healthy balance and self-compassion, we’re likely contributing to a dangerous culture of disordered eating with all the health implications that accompany it.
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