What most people think of when they think of health is food, diet, exercise, etc. They have an idea of what you’re supposed to look like, how you’re supposed to feel. But health applies to how you think about it, too.
I personally have a history of disordered eating, which is something my mental health treatment team knows very well. It’s a complicated ordeal to manage and attempt tomake it better because of the mental aspect. In my history of eating, I’ve done several diets, yet all of them led to me focusing only on how I thought I looked, ignoring how I felt when I decided I was eating too much, and in the end, falling into the deadly trap that my disordered eating always catches me in. It’s hard to ignore the voice in my head that says I don’t look right or that I don’t look “pretty” (whatever that means) when it literally changes my visual perception of my body.
It started when I swam competitively growing up, surrounded by other half-naked bodies and fingers pinching skin and the words “fat” and “ugly” being thrown at the skin of children who didn’t know half the weight of those words. I suppose it embedded itself into my brain to overly control how much I ate or how much I exercised, to treat food and my body like a punishment or reward rather than as a vessel or a tool or, you know, a temple. It warped how I saw myself, and I can no longer trust that I see myself objectively in the mirror anymore. I struggled with cycles of eating next to nothing to binging a whole pizza in an hour. I’d feel sick every second of the day, and my stomach still never feels quite right at any given moment. The National Association of Anorexia Nervosa and Associated Disorders states that “77% of children and adolescents as young as 12 dislike their bodies” and 22% have unhealthy eating behaviors that could lead to or indicate eating disorders. Anorexia Nervosa has the highest mortality rate of any mental disorder. It kills.
So, following that crude description of what it might feel like to hate your body, yourself, and how you look under the guise of “health,” I would like to offer up a proposal to younger (and older!) readers: start with letting go. Let go of your preconceptions of health and what it looks like, what it’s supposed to feel like. When you go to the gym, focus on strength, not how it’ll show on your body. When you eat, focus on eating your fill, not on the hunger that grumbles in your stomach. There are filling low-calorie foods if you’re truly wanting to be in a deficit, and even then, having a nice calorically dense meal every once in a while won’t kill you. Focus on the things you enjoy and what empowers you.
Now don’t get me wrong, I’m not against calorie counting, calorie deficits, and healthy weight loss or gain. In fact, I’ve tried my fair share of these things. However, something I’ve had to learn is that in order to actually follow through with these, I need to fix my relationship with my body and food. Otherwise, I’d fall into the same cycles of heavy restriction and binging, trying to control everything I consumed or didn’t consume, focusing on the hunger in my stomach or how I thought I looked in the mirror and equating that to progress rather than numbers. (I know this is the opposite problem for many people too). I don’t recommend starting without a proper dietitian and psychiatrist to hold you accountable to your habits. Thank god for mine. And still, talking about food makes me anxious; it reignites my nervous system, makes me stutter and sweat, and want to leave the room immediately. So I’m not ready to control it in the way that I might want to. In a healthy way. Because it wouldn’t be healthy if my head’s not in it, and it can’t be in it right now. I’d suggest taking care of that first, before anything.
References
National Association of Anorexia Nervosa and Associated Disorders, https://anad.org/learning-library-old/eating-disorder-statistic/, 2026.
