A Call to Reorient Disordered Eating
- Damara Loewen
- Oct 22
- 3 min read
Updated: Dec 8
It might seem like not very many of your clients struggle with disordered eating. Maybe one or two.
Or maybe you refer out at any signs approaching eating disorder territory. That’d be pretty likely if you hold the common view that disordered eating is just a “less severe eating disorder”.
Similar presentation, but not quite meeting the criteria threshold for a diagnosable eating disorder.
That is, until you learn just how much of our health information is actually misinformation. How much of our “weight science” is actually just a narrative crafted by the weight loss industry.
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When you start learning things like 95-97% of weight loss attempts fail. With 2/3rds of the people gaining back even more weight. You realize that we’re not actually in control of our weight.
When you dig into the research to understand why, you see that God designed us to resist weight loss. We gain the weight back because we’re supposed to. That’s our body doing everything it can to save our life. You come to see that your body isn’t your enemy - it’s your friend.
Dig even more and you’ll see just how insanely biased our weight science research is. But that bit makes a tad more sense when you learn it’s almost always funded by the weight loss companies 🙄
This one will really blow your mind 🤯 The research also shows that our weight and health are primarily determined by our genetics, Social Determinants of Health (including weight stigma and any other form of discrimination), our Set Point Range and our body’s response to weight loss. Not by our food and exercise choices. It’s not just a matter of calculating calorie in vs calorie out. Our food and exercise choices actually have very little impact on our health.
Spending our lives trying to eat “right” doesn’t make us healthier. It makes us obsessed with our food and hating our bodies. Attempting (or even achieving short term) weight loss doesn’t make us healthier. Our best bet is usually to just stay the weight that we are and if we want to focus on our health, then we do that without focusing on our weight. Because weight is not synonymous with health.
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So once we debunk these myths and learn the truth, then “disordered eating” starts to take on a whole new meaning.
Have you been taught that binge eating, or emotional eating, were obviously disordered eating behavior?
But is it actually disordered to compensate for restriction with out of control eating when our body is so desperate for life-sustaining energy?
Isn’t it actually more disordered to put so much of your energy (and identity) into controlling something that you have very little control over?
Given what we now know about weight loss, isn’t it actually more disordered to expect ourselves
to be able to easily perform an impossible task?
Isn’t it actually disordered to prioritize futile attempts to shrink our bodies at the expense of our physical, mental, emotional, relational and spiritual health?
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I think it’s high-time we re-evaluated what we think of as disordered eating.
Because when we look at it from this perspective, how many of your clients aren’t engaged in disordered eating?
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Want to go Deeper?
Download the free “Becoming a Weight-Inclusive Provider” workbook for Mental Health Professionals.
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