The food we eat does impact our body and our health. When we think about this idea, it often gets conflated with “wellness culture”, and the idea that we need to eat perfectly “for our health”. What we don’t often focus on however, is the damage we can do to our health through restriction. When we begin restricting foods, we are restricting our bodies from getting needed nutrients, particularly when we start eliminating whole categories of food (i.e. carbs, gluten, meat, dairy, sugar, etc). This is true even if we are not restricting the amount of food we eat! This often leads to our body not getting enough of something it needs while also getting an excess of some other type of food.

As you can imagine, this can lead to a wide variety of health issues. Not to mention the added impact on our health that engaging in other disordered eating behaviors such as restricting calories, binging, purging, and over exercise. In reality, if we have a history of a troubled relationship with food, eating disorder etc. we have often in multiple ways, impacted our health negatively by doing so. This may seem somewhat obvious, but we so often get so caught up in the idea that we are actually engaging in these behaviors in order to benefit our health, that we don’t think about how we can be actively harming instead of helping our bodies and our health. Reminding ourselves of the good we are doing for ourselves by feeding ourselves adequately, listening to our bodies, and treating ourselves with kindness is such a powerful thing.