Last Updated on 1 month by Isreal Olabanji DST RN
Do you feel better after a good meal? Or does it sometimes make you feel lethargic?
Food has a huge effect on how we feel about yourself and our bodies, and it can have an even greater effect on the mind and mental health.
Food and Eating Disorders
Many patients seeking binge eating disorder treatment will say that their binge and purge cycle helps them stay in control of both their eating and control of their lives. It’s very common for most eating disorders to be triggered by a traumatic experience and for patients to feel like they must take charge of one small area of their lives to feel like they have even bigger control over their lives.
Eating disorders can happen to anyone at any age. As much as we’re used to seeing articles about children with eating disorders, they are also quite common in adults too, and the rising influence of celebrities and influencers isn’t helping this trend go away either.
The Rise of Celebrity
Celebrity culture has always been a problem, ever since the 1920s when the first real celebrities came around, and fad diets began to circulate to the average household.
In particular, women have always had their looks criticized and been judged accordingly, but the change in what people assume is a ‘healthy’ body now and what was considered a ‘healthy’ body a few hundred years ago has been stark.
In the 1800s, a woman with wide hips and larger breasts was considered a good catch as she appeared to be better suited to handle childbearing, but these days women are expected to be thin and lean, with smaller waists and much smaller breasts, and this is an attainment that most women can’t manage.
Celebrity culture doesn’t help this, and neither does the focus on a ‘youthful’ looking appearance, which most women will know, is only fleeting at best.
Clean Eating?
It’s not just celebrities in magazines and on the silver screen that is the problem either if you spend any time on social networking platforms like Instagram and TikTok, you’ll see that the craze over clean eating is having a huge impact on the minds of both young people and adults alike.
Singling out clean eating may be a little unfair, as it’s been well documented that improving your diet with whole grains and less processed food is a good thing, and it will boost your mental health too, but when people take it too far, it can become a really dangerous problem.
The clean eating crazy from untrained influencers with no nutritional background has caused all kinds of problems in recent years, and even sadly contributed to some deaths too.
It’s not just the eating either, companies like Herbalife and Beach Body have promoted unhealthy products in pyramid scheme-like business opportunities across social media that have sucked unsuspecting people in and contributed to the loss of not only a small fortune in money but also negatively impacting their physical and mental health., in some cases ruining lives in their wake.
