The Link Between Disordered Eating and Social Media
It’s a Friday night and you have no plans. You decide it would be a great opportunity for you to snuggle up with your Netflix queue and enjoy a homemade healthy dinner.
Yes, tonight is the night you will be good.
You will be good and eat good, healthy food and finally start that diet you keep telling yourself needs to happen.
Putting on comfortable clothes, you turn on your television and start that movie you’ve watched a million times but just never get tired of, with a bowl of steamed broccoli and grilled chicken resting in your lap. After three minutes, the meal you spent 30 minutes preparing disappeared.
Damn.
That wasn’t very satiating.
Your antsy hands get restless so you start sifting through Instagram, looking at other people’s dinners.
Amy is having a sushi date with her boyfriend of two years. It’s their one cheat meal for the week.
Kayla is enjoying a “protein power bowl” with all the delicious toppings. Apparently, it fits her macros.
Denise is having a weird but delicious-looking sugar-free, fat-free waffle egg sandwich after her intense leg session. This is something she calls clean eating.
All of these beautifully fit people in their beautiful relationships eating their beautiful food.
You start thinking, well maybe I should spend tonight finding out what my macros are, that way I can add more food into my dinner tonight because I’m still hungry and this way, I can do it without feeling bad about it!
So you pull up some bullshit macro calculator to figure out your daily caloric and macro needs. After pinpointing the number, you find a calorie and macro counting app on your iphone and start logging in all of the food you have that day.
Thirty minutes later, you’ve logged all of your food, though you feel a little guilty because you didn’t weigh everything earlier in the day so you’re not sure if you’re entering the correct grams.
This thought eats away at you, but you try to ignore it and say you’ll start fresh tomorrow.
That’s right you’ll start fresh tomorrow, so in actuality you really deserve to eat whatever you want tonight.
Yes, yes forget the calories and macrocounting tonight, tomorrow the real diet starts and so tonight you can really eat whatever.
You reach for the fat-free sweet potato chips you have on your top shelf hidden far in the back. Cracking open the bag, you pour out all of the contents into a big bowl and begin to nosh.
Thirty minutes later, you feel terrible. You have guilt. You’re angry. You’re bloated and frustrated. You don’t feel like you did what Kayla from Instagram must have done in order to get those crazy amazing abs she has.
You decide that you need to create an actual meal plan to follow tomorrow to ensure you stay on track.
An hour later you have your diet planned perfectly, down to the last macronutrient gram.
Yes! You look at your clock and see it’s midnight. Your night is gone.
But not before one more fat-free cookie……
And so the cycle continues.
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How familiar does this situation sound?
Honestly, think about it. Have you been here before?
I sure know I have. And it’s not easy. But here is what I have been able to gather from reflecting on these patterns.
We all have triggers. One of my triggers is comparison. Unfortunately, we live in a day and age where social media is a huge part of life, and social media makes it extremely easy to compare in an instant.
Listen to me now.
Nobody’s life is perfect. And therefore, there is no reason you should waste a single moment of your beautiful life comparing yourself to somebody else’s life, and the same goes for diet. If social media and Instagram and Facebook are all contributing to how you structure your diet and eat your foods then it’s really time for you to make a huge decision.
I challenge you to make a choice. Decide for yourself to:
Delete your IG, Facebook, Pinterest or what have you for one month.
Unfollow every account that triggers you.
This may sound extreme, but it’s actually not. In fact, this is one of the best things I ever did for myself.
On top of unfollowing accounts, I actually stopped contributing to the fad. I very rarely take pictures of my food. I rarely check in anywhere about where I’m eating or who I’m with.
Now, I live in the moment.
I don’t need “fans” to like my food. I NEED TO LIKE MY FOOD. PERIOD.
I am the only person that matter when it comes to what I put in my body, and I hope more of us can start to see it that way.
Additionally, I no longer have nights where I make steamed broccoli and dry chicken breast. Why? Cause that’s not what nourishes me. That’s not what makes me satiated. It might for some people, but for many, they eat that simply because they’re trying to restrict themselves for the sake of following some bogus diet.
Stop the comparison and naturally, you may learn to stop the dieting. Stop the dieting, and you’ll stop the disordered eating.
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This week I implore you to accept my challenge.
Break the comparison-ensuing-link that’s binding you to disordered eating.
Do it.
There is a strong link between disordered eating and social media. Find out what it is here