10 Symptoms of Disordered Eating Patterns
You can still have disordered eating patterns even though you may not be diagnosed with an eating disorder. Disordered eating is when you engage in patterns that create an unhealthy relationship with food. To live a healthy life, you need to make peace with food and see it as satisfaction and a way to fuel your body. Today, the media often portrays food as only satisfaction or only as fuel, which creates disordered eating patterns.
Having a disordered relationship with food can lead to obsessive thoughts with food, slower metabolism, weight cycling, decreased self-esteem, high stress, nutrient deficiency, and damaged gut health and digestion.
These symptoms should not be used as a diagnosis for an eating disorder; they are just common symptoms of people who have a bad relationship with food. Though, many of these symptoms can lead to an eating disorder depending on severity. Refer this post to someone you know who may be struggling with these symptoms of disordered eating.
Here are the 10 symptoms of disordered eating patterns:
1. Obsessive thoughts of food
Obsessive thoughts of food are one of the symptoms of disordered eating. If you are constantly thinking about your next meal or about foods, you would love to eat but won’t allow yourself, this is obsessive. What we tell ourselves we can’t have, we only want more of. Say you tell yourself ‘no more ice cream until summer,’ now all you will think about is wanting ice cream, and you will count down the days until you can have it again. In disordered eating, you put food on a pedestal, whereas when you have a healthy relationship with food, you get to choose when you want ice cream based on how much you actually have a taste for it. Food should not consume your mind all day. Food is important, but you should have plenty of other interests and things to think about during your day. Your next meal should not give you stress or anxiety about what you will or won’t eat.
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2. Restriction followed by uncontrollable overeating or binges
Food restriction followed by uncontrollable overeating or binge episodes is another one of the symptoms of disordered eating. Restricting your food intake below a healthy limit is unhealthy because it will trigger your hunger hormones to kick into overdrive which makes it harder and harder for you to continue restriction. Eventually, you reach a breaking point, and you may find yourself neck-deep in a gallon of ice cream and it seems like you have no control as you contain to finish off an enormous amount of food to the point of sickness. Following this episode, usually, shame and guilt arise because you feel like you should have stopped eating sooner, and this leads to further restriction the next day. In reality, you probably couldn’t have stopped eating because your body was so afraid of starving it sent all signals possible to get you to eat more food. Now overeating an extra piece of pizza is not the same as a binge because a binge is an uncontrolled eating episode where you eat a large amount of food, usually alone, and it feels uncontrollable. This feeling of not having control is part of disordered eating because in a healthy relationship with food you should have the capability to tell when you are hungry and when you are full, but in disordered eating, these signals are blurred and you don’t know how to listen to your body.
3. Mindset of good foods and bad foods
Having the mindset that there are good foods and bad foods is another one of the symptoms of disordered eating. This mindset usually originates from the nutrient content in foods and that the foods with high amounts of things like protein, fiber, healthy fat, vitamins, and minerals are considered ‘good’ and foods without those things but just have high amounts of sugar and salt are considered ‘bad’. Unfortunately, this mindset can lead many people to fear the ‘bad’ foods and they put these foods on a pedestal as they shouldn’t be eaten ever. The problem with this is that, if you have no allergies, are you really never going to eat another slice of cake, another piece of pizza, or another pancake with syrup? Probably not, so there is no use in demonizing food. In addition, moderation of these fun foods isn’t going to change your weight or health markers in the long term. Think of all foods as equal. There is no negative or positive association with food. Labeling foods as junk, unhealthy, bad, and fattening are all impractical and damaging ways to view food.
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4. Viewing food as something that makes you gain weight
Viewing food as something that makes you gain weight is another one of the symptoms of disordered eating. This is because viewing food as a thing that adds mass to your body, will inherently make you averse to eating enough calories resulting in aggressive restriction. As mentioned, food restriction is detrimental and many times can lead to binge episodes. Restriction of calories can also decrease muscle and bone mass, hormone levels, brain function, and create nutrient deficiencies. We need food to survive, and many people do not realize that you burn the majority of your daily calories just from all the processes going on inside your body that keep you alive (heartbeat, breathing, heat regulation). Worrying about food causing weight gain will only make eating meals a stressful time when in reality, you are probably eating less than you need or close to the right amount. Listen to your body and what it wants and your weight should stabilize where it is happiest.
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5. Daily calorie counting and weighing food
Daily calorie counting and weighing food is another one of the symptoms of disordered eating. This is because when you see food as a calorie count or as a weight, you remove yourself from the actual taste of the food and what the food will do for you. Seeing food as calories can make you attempt to eat the lowest amount possible, which is damaging because food does so much for us besides adding calories to our body. In addition, the calorie count on the nutrition facts label is allowed to be 20% off by the FDA regulations. For example, you might see a label that says a serving is 100 calories but in reality, it is 119 calories per serving. Companies are also allowed to round down any item that has 0.4g of something to 0g on the label. Overtime if many foods you eat have the wrong calorie count listed, you think you are eating way less than you are in reality and therefore calorie counting is useless because it’s inaccurate.
Source: FDA
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6. Cutting out a food group
Cutting out a food group is another one of the symptoms of disordered eating. Now, this does not include if you are allergic or heavily intolerant to certain foods that you know to give you a bad reaction. If you do not have intolerances or allergies to any foods, you should not eliminate foods from your diet just because of their nutrient profile. Similar to labeling foods as good and bad, you shouldn’t completely cut certain foods out because usually, the foods you cut out are the foods you enjoy but you think are damaging your weight or health. Interestingly enough when you give food power in this way and you label them as a ‘never eat’ food, this will only drive you to eat it more, resulting in a binge. There is nothing wrong with eating that food when you want it in moderation. This way it will not consume your mind and might actually crave it less when you allow yourself to eat it.
Additionally, many people become vegan or vegetarian for the ethics of the environment and animal treatment, but many of these people are secretly doing it because they believe they can lose weight off of the eating pattern. This is where it gets disordered when you do it to lose weight. Additionally, not everyone can mentally and physically sustain a vegetarian and vegan lifestyle which is expected. Some symptoms indicating that your body doesn’t like the low or no animal product diet include hair loss, dry skin, brittle nails, feeling cold, brain fog, and possible low energy. Furthermore, following a low meat diet like vegetarians and vegans can pose consequences for the digestive tract over the long term. On low protein diets, our stomach can decrease stomach acid production because protein is the hardest macronutrient to breakdown. Overtime with low stomach acid this leaves more undigested food in the intestines causing poor absorption, bloating, and gut bacterial overgrowth.
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7. Skipping meals when you’re hungry
Skipping meals when you’re actually hungry is another one of the symptoms of disordered eating. If you frequently skip breakfast or lunch just to make sure you aren’t eating too much, is a very damaging behavior to your body and mind. Blood sugar will drop to very low levels and this will increase stress in the body to make energy out of your stores. Hunger hormones will kick into overdrive making you think about food and become irritable. Listen to your hunger signals, your stomach is growling because it is running low on energy.
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8. Cheat Days
Cheat days are another one of the symptoms of disordered eating. The idea behind cheat days is that people need a day of the week, usually a weekend, you gorge on all the foods they love because the rest of the week they will hate what they are eating during their diet. This is a disordered pattern because it reinforces that fun foods can’t be incorporated during the week and it has to be only the boring stuff. The name cheat in cheat day also emphasizes a negative connotation that the foods you eat on a cheat day are bad foods, which as mentioned is disordered to label foods that way. Cheat days many times turn into one big binge day which also was mentioned as disordered because you should be able to enjoy these ‘cheat’ foods during the week and eat them as normal foods.
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9. Exercising to cancel out the food you ate
Exercising to cancel out the food you ate is another one of the symptoms of disordered eating. As mentioned, most of your calories burned during the day come from just keeping you alive through biological processes in the body. Exercise is just a small percentage of the total amount of calories you burn in a day, obviously depending on the duration and intensity, but this is typically the case. You should exercise because you enjoy it or because you know it helps with a multitude of other health markers, but not because it ‘cancels out’ calories from the food you ate. This system makes you think of food as numbers and isolates food from what it really is. As you see food as a metric you treat it as a metric, and food should not be looked at that way.
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10. Avoiding social events
Avoiding social events is another one of the symptoms of disordered eating, and this can be the result of two problems. People may avoid social events because they are afraid of being around fun foods or ‘cheat’ foods because they worry they won’t be able to restrain themself from indulging, which is a disordered behavior. On the flip side, other people may avoid social events because they are insecure about their body and don’t want to show up looking how they do and be surrounded by food. Both of these motives are evidence of possible symptoms of disordered eating because it displays that food takes priority over social life. Food should not be the deciding matter on whether you spend time with people.
