I want to start off by telling you a little story about a woman who struggled with orthorexia. For those that don’t know, orthorexia refers to anxious-obsessive behaviour over “clean eating.” It’s another form of food-obsession, but it’s masked by a fixation on healthy clean foods.
During her darkest hour, she was doing two workouts per day which included strenuous activities like long-distance running and CrossFit circuits.
Even though she was doing two workouts a day, which requires many calories to sustain, she also continued to restrict her diet far below a sustainable level.
She calorie-counted to the extreme.
She knew it wasn’t healthy, but all she wanted was to control the shape of her body. She wanted to maintain her identity as someone who had will-power; someone who was in control.
Although she claimed to be in the best physical shape of her life, it didn't feel like enough. She no longer trusted herself to make decisions about food and whenever she ate some sugar she went all in and binged.
Her self-esteem was crippled because she couldn’t reach her goals, which were set way too high. As a result, she would find herself sitting in the car parked up somewhere binge eating "bad foods" and hiding the wrappers.
She hid the evidence from others so they wouldn't know how much she had eaten...
That woman was me!
I'm sure you can all relate to experiences of body dysmorphia, body hate, and shameful eating behaviour.
When we feel like a failure, it's only natural to try to hide the evidence.
Shame is an ugly beast.
I was pondering the question, do we binge eat at night because that's when our willpower is the lowest, or because that's when no one is looking?...
