Evaluating Eating and Exercise Habits
- Do you spend time wishing parts of your body looked different?
- Do you skip meals?
- Do you count the calories or fat grams in anything you eat?
- Do you exercise so much that you are fatigued or have frequent injuries?
Constant concern about body weight and shape, fat grams, and calories can start a vicious cycle of body dissatisfaction and obsession. The things you’re doing to be thin can quickly spin out of control and become a serious, life-threatening eating disorder.
What is Disordered Eating?
- Do you constantly calculate numbers of fat grams and calories?
- Do you weigh yourself often and find yourself obsessed with the number on the scale?
- Do you exercise to burn off calories and not for health and enjoyment?
- Do you ever feel out of control when you are eating?
- Do your eating patterns include extreme dieting, preferences for certain foods, withdrawn or ritualized behaviors at mealtime, or secretive bingeing?
- Has weight loss, dieting, and/or control of food become one of you major concerns?
- Do you feel ashamed, disgusted, or guilty after eating?
- Do you constantly worry about the weight, shape, or size of you body?
- Do you feel like your identity and value is based on how you look or how much you weigh?
These attitudes and behaviors can take a toll on your mental, emotional, and physical well being. it is important that you start to talk about your eating habits and concerns now, rather than waiting until your situation gets more serious than you can handle. Tell a friend, teacher, parent, coach, youth group leader, doctor, counselor, or nutritionist what you’re going through. It is important to get some support to change the thoughts and behaviors you are experiencing now.
Information taken from NEDA, the National Eating Disorders Association
