Unhealthy healthy lifestyle: 5 signs that you went too far

The call for a healthy lifestyle sounds everywhere: beauties without a gram of excess fat look at us from the pages of magazines, movie stars advertise sportswear and attributes on TV, and products labeled “fitness” are much more expensive than their unlabeled “neighbors” on supermarket shelves.

The multi-million dollar beauty industry diligently imposes images of beauty and health, spends impressive budgets on marketing. As a result, almost everyone has at least once heard about miraculous goods and services: protein bars, soy milk lattes, biorevitalization. Almost every second self-respecting healthy lifestyle has tried fasting, crazy cutting, raw food, veganism, yoga, detox, sleep apps and other fashion trends.

How can you not succumb to the influence of the trend by starting to count calories and pump your body in the gym? But, alas, often the fashionable race for beauty and health turns into addictions, mental disorders and even bodily injuries.

What is the danger of fanaticism in a healthy lifestyle?

Paying close attention to your diet and lifestyle is a good habit, but on the condition that you do not go to extremes. Surely you have met people who read ingredients on labels, spend the lion’s share of the time searching for organic products, sit in gyms around the clock, condemning those who do not adhere to this lifestyle. All this is a real neurotic disorder.

Steven Bratman, MD, coined the term “orthorexia” to describe this phenomenon. The term stands for an eating disorder associated with an unhealthy obsession with healthy eating.

Orthorexic differs from the usual healthy lifestyle lover in that he lives in constant extremes:

• Chooses products not for taste, but only for usefulness.
• Carefully avoids prohibited foods, which include more than five items (sweet, starchy, salty, fatty, starchy and gluten-containing, and others).
• Executes himself for using something from the prohibited list.
• Constantly changes the diet and diet.
• Strictly divides all people into “us” (adherents of proper nutrition) and “strangers”.
• Strives for total control of his diet and life.
• All food is divided into two categories – useful and poison.

Often orthorexia is accompanied by dependence on daily grueling workouts – the so-called “sportaholic syndrome”. This is another extreme of a healthy lifestyle.

To feel good, a fitness fanatic improves his training system every day, tries to do longer and harder. As a result, the loads can turn out to be so great that the body simply cannot cope, and the sportsaholic immediately after training will end up in the hospital. In addition, constantly forcing yourself to train is fraught with serious psychological problems.

The fitness addict differs from the average workout addict in that:

• Thinks only about improving the quality of training;
• He devotes all the time to classes, and if force majeure happens and you have to shorten the workout, he feels irritability, anxiety, aggression and even pain.

Healthy lifestyle fans accumulate the so-called Wellness fatigue – fatigue from the struggle for health, a condition that does not give people a sense of well-being and inner joy.

5 signs that your healthy lifestyle is no longer healthy

1. Increased levels of anxiety and obsessive fears. A person who is dependent on a healthy lifestyle does not allow himself to deviate from the rules and is very afraid that something might go wrong. For crimes in the form of an eaten piece of cake or skipping a workout, he necessarily punishes himself and feels guilty.
2. Healthy lifestyle is the most important thing in life. A fan builds his day so that work or anything else does not interfere with diet and training. Instead of meeting friends, he would rather read another smart book on nutrition or cook an overly complex but very healthy meal.
3. Lots of time for healthy lifestyle. Since proper nutrition and exercise are a priority, the addict spends most of his time on them. He can spend hours looking for the right foods or developing a healthy diet. Or choose one or more sports and try to become a champion in it.
4. Complicated speech with medical terms with and without. Relatives and friends of a healthy lifestyle fan notice that it is simply impossible to transfer the conversation to some other topic other than the “correct” lifestyle. And if you try to object to his arguments, there is a chance to stumble upon aggression and new arguments.
5. Feeling of superiority over others. A healthy lifestyle addict sincerely believes that those who are not in the topic of a healthy lifestyle cannot be happy. Therefore, he constantly teaches, criticizes everyone who, in his opinion, lives “not like that.”

Real story

Thirty-year-old Ira is a victim of the beauty industry. After listening and watching the tricks of marketers, she believed that if you don’t eat organic food, don’t pump your buttocks, don’t add volume to your lips and chest, don’t give beauty injections, there is simply no chance for a happy personal life. And the husband will go to another, the one that does all this.

With all the perfectionism inherent in her, the girl took up “improvements”. She put all her strength on the perfect body, completely without thinking about the other side of the issue. And at first, the husband took the changes normally, he was even delighted at how prettier his wife was. But then it all turned into addiction, Ira did not notice anything around, except for training. The husband was tired, he packed his things and left. A frustrated and lost girl came to me for a consultation. Her ideal picture of the world collapsed in an instant.

What to do?

Physical activity, a balanced diet, healthy sleep are undoubtedly important. An individual approach is also important, taking into account the psychological state of a person and choosing the type of activity that will strengthen his psyche, and not add new addictions and insecurities.

Many people recommend physical activity as a way to deal with stress. You need to understand what kind of activity is right for you. Here everything is individual. For example, if a person has depression, strength training is not recommended for him, because there is already little strength and energy.

Often people impose restrictions on themselves, because they read somewhere that it is necessary to do it this way, but they did not understand the reasons and motives thoroughly. And this is also an unhealthy approach.

There is no panacea. You just need to find “your own” – something that helps you feel cheerful, active and joyful. And for this it is important to regulate tension and relaxation, work and rest. If you focus on these feelings and stick to common sense, then a healthy lifestyle will only benefit you.