The Wellness Advice That Looks Harmless but Encourages Disordered Eating

A friend suggests getting pizza on Friday and, before you’ve even decided what topping you fancy, you’re thinking about what you’ll need to do for the rest of the day. Maybe you’ll have a smaller lunch. Maybe you’ll go for a run on Saturday morning to burn those pizza calories off. You were looking forward to seeing your friend, but now part of you is wondering whether it would be easier to suggest meeting for coffee instead or even consider saying no to the invite.

Where do these types of thoughts come from? It might come from a reel about being ‘mindful’ when you eat out or a fitness post about getting ‘back on track’ after the weekend. Much of it sounds reasonable at first. Planning ahead can be helpful, and there’s plenty to enjoy about moving your body. It’s worth looking more closely at what the advice asks you to do when you’re hungry, tired or simply want something different from what you planned. This is how some wellness advice can find its way into an ordinary day and develop into these types of thoughts.

So the decision about meeting for pizza with your friend becomes much more than deciding which pizzeria to go to and what time to meet.

When ‘healthy’ starts to mean ‘less’

Sometimes, if there’s a pudding I’m looking forward to later in the day, I’ll have it then and leave it at that. If I’m out for lunch and know there’s a lovely pudding waiting at home, it makes sense to skip the one on the lunch menu. That still leaves room for a yummy lunch that satisfies me and, if needed, something to eat in the afternoon if I’m hungry, alongside eating the pudding after my evening meal. Waiting for pudding is simply a choice about when I’d most enjoy it and who I want to enjoy it with.

The phrase, ‘Saving yourself’, can also mean spending the afternoon hungry because you feel you have to make room for the pudding by eating less earlier. Perhaps you’ve already had a snack and now feel you’ve used up your chance to have dessert. You might spend the evening trying to work out whether you’ve eaten ‘well enough’ to have it, then struggle to enjoy it when it arrives because you’ve been ‘good’ all day and now you’re eating something ‘naughty’. The concern with this pudding example, is the way the rule turns ordinary hunger and enjoyment into things you have to negotiate with yourself.

A good way to see the difference is to imagine the plans changing. Say the friend you’re having lunch with suggests sharing a pudding that sounds delicious. You might still decide to wait for the one at home. You might decide to share it. With a flexible choice, either answer is available to you. When a rule is doing the deciding, changing your mind can feel like you’ve let yourself down, even if nobody else at the table has given it a second thought.

Other wellness advice starts with a perfectly ordinary idea and quietly turns it into a test of how little you can get by on. Having a glass of water because you’re thirsty is one thing. Repeatedly trying to drink your way through hunger because a post told you that snacking shows a lack of discipline feels very different. An afternoon snack can be the thing that gets you through a late meeting without spending the last half hour thinking about what’s in the fridge.

‘Just have a lighter lunch’ can be an equally slippery bit of advice. Some days a lighter lunch suits your appetite or your plans. But if the advice leads you to keep choosing a lunch that leaves you hungry because you’ve been told a bigger one is ‘too much’, it can make the afternoon harder than it needs to be. There’s a particular frustration in spending all afternoon thinking about food and then blaming yourself for how much you want to eat when you finally get home. The advice gets credit for your restraint at lunchtime, while you get the blame for being hungry later.

When movement becomes a way to make up for eating

A fitness post that calls a Monday workout ‘damage control’ after the weekend might be meant as a joke. It encourages you to think of Sunday roast as ‘damage’. Once you’ve heard that idea often enough, it can start to feel perfectly normal to decide how much exercise you need based on what you ate the day before.

A walk after lunch can be a lovely way to get some fresh air or spend time with someone you rarely get to talk to. You might have a regular class you enjoy and feel a bit grumpy when you miss it. There’s room for that disappointment. What’s worth noticing is whether missing the class changes how you feel about what you’re allowed to eat, or whether you push yourself to go when you’re exhausted because resting would leave you feeling guilty about lunch.

Imagine you’ve planned to go for a walk and it’s pouring with rain. You might still fancy going, or you might prefer to make a cup of tea and stay in the warm and get cosy. If staying in feels impossible because you ate pudding, or if you decide dinner has to be smaller because you stayed in, food and movement have become tied together in a way that can be hard to live with.

This is what people mean when they talk about compensatory exercise. The movement is being used to try to make up for eating. From the outside, it may look exactly like someone keeping up with a fitness routine. From the inside, it can feel as if the workout has to happen before you can relax or eat normally again. If you recognise a recurring urge to exercise to make up for eating, that’s worth taking seriously.

Why it can be so hard to spot

Part of the difficulty is that many of these messages come from people who genuinely think they’re helping. A friend might suggest being ‘good’ at lunch so you can both enjoy dinner. A trainer might talk about ‘earning’ a weekend meal. You may follow someone on Instagram who has a large following, which can give the impression they are an expert in their chosen wellness field and you take their advice seriously. A post about getting ‘back on track’ can sound reassuring when life feels chaotic and somebody is offering you a plan. The language is familiar, and the people using it may be people you trust.

There can also be a sense of relief when a rule tells you what to do. If you’re tired of making decisions about food, being given one clear answer can feel easier. That helps explain why a rule can stick even when following it is making your life harder. You might feel relieved when you’ve followed it and anxious when you haven’t. It’s easy to read that relief as proof the rule is helping, especially when people around you are praising your ‘discipline’.

Then there’s the part other people rarely see. They see you order a salad. They have no idea whether it was the thing you most fancied or whether you spent ten minutes wanting the sandwich and worrying what ordering it would say about you. They see you turn up for a Saturday workout. They don’t know that you woke up tired and spent half an hour trying to convince yourself you were allowed to stay in bed. The decision might look the same from the outside, but the amount of effort and worry involved can be miles apart.

It can be easier to spot the pattern when you think about the plans you’ve stopped making. Perhaps you used to say yes when a colleague suggested lunch on the spur of the moment, but now you usually find a reason to stay at your desk. Each time, the decision might make sense to you in the moment. It’s only when you realise how much you miss those lunches that you see what the rule has been costing you.

How harmless advice can encourage disordered eating

Think back to that Friday pizza. ‘Have a lighter lunch’ might sound like a sensible tip, and ‘get back on track tomorrow’ might sound like encouragement. Put them together and the message changes. You’re supposed to do something before the meal to justify having it, and something afterwards to make up for it. By the time you sit down with your friend, a meal you were looking forward to has become something you feel you need to manage rather than just being in the moment and enjoying it.

The advice can keep the pattern going even when it makes eating more stressful. If you spend the afternoon hungry and arrive wanting more pizza than you expected, you might take that as proof you need to be stricter next time. If a run takes away some of the guilt the following morning, it makes sense that you’d want that same relief the next time you eat out. Over time, eating less beforehand and exercising afterwards can come to feel like the conditions that make saying yes to pizza possible.

That’s where the link to disordered eating comes in. Advice that treats hunger as something to push through and eating as something to make up for can reinforce the very behaviours that make food feel harder to navigate. The advice can sound especially convincing when it’s dressed up as taking care of yourself. If it leaves you more anxious about eating, more dependent on rules or less able to enjoy time with friends, those experiences matter in their own right.

What would feel more supportive?

When a piece of wellness advice sticks in your head, try asking what you’d need to make the day easier. On that Friday, it might be a lunch that keeps you going through work, pizza with your friend and a Saturday morning you can decide how to spend it because you’re doing something you want to do, not what you think you should do. You can look forward to pudding later and still have something to eat if you’re hungry now. There’s room for your plans to change as the day unfolds.

If that feels straightforward on paper and harder in real life, give yourself some kindness and self compassion. When a rule has offered reassurance for a long time, questioning it can feel unsettling. A place to start is simply noticing when it crops up. Perhaps the thought that you need to ‘make up for’ dinner arrives just as you’re deciding whether to rest. Recognising where that thought came from can give you a moment to ask what would actually help you that morning.

For me, that’s part of what Nourish Not Punish means. Taking care of yourself includes eating enough to give you the right amount of energy to live your day, enjoying the glimmers, have the catch up with your friend whilst munching on pizza and letting yourself rest when you need it.

If food rules are taking up more of your day than you’d like, book a complimentary Clarity Call. We can talk about what feels hardest around food right now and explore what kind of support would suit you.