At the height of my orthorexia, I didn’t eat much.
I came up with really great meal plans with really great ingredients, all the time. I’ve loved planning meals for years, but I didn’t always follow through with them because I was easily overwhelmed. The healthiest recipes were either overly complicated or overly simple (aka. bland). I didn’t know it then, but I was craving more than variety — I wanted flexibility.
While my orthorexic tendencies gave me plenty of opportunities to get creative with health substitutions, what I needed was food freedom. I needed the freedom to change my meal plans as needed. I needed the freedom to eat something that wasn’t planned. I needed freedom to eat something imperfect.
There were days when I barely ate because I was so worried that I’d eat something wrong and end up with a diagnosis I could have prevented through my perfect eating. Because I had so many food rules telling me what I should eat, I ended up eating very little. My list of “safe” foods kept getting smaller and smaller. It often depended on the latest food fad, and I would drive myself crazy trying to include as many super foods as possible in my diet while eliminating as many unhealthy foods as I could.
My plan to eat perfectly meant eating became a chore. And even though I knew what I should be eating, I didn’t know how to properly honor my hunger cues and didn’t know that eating anything was better than eating nothing.
Nowadays I just eat. I plan on eating something, knowing that I have permission to feed myself without forcing myself to wait for healthier foods. Sometimes I notice my perfectionism creeping into my intuitive eating practice, which can look like not eating because “nothing sounds good.”
Intuitive eating is more than just eating whatever/whenever I want. It includes honoring my health through gentle nutrition, which can look like planning for when I’m hungry even if I’m not. While it’s frustrating when my body doesn’t tell me what it wants, I also know that’s normal. And I still need to eat something, because when nothing sounds good it’s really easy in those moments to not eat anything.
Maybe your food choices or eating habits aren’t perfect. That’s ok! But are you eating? If eating imperfectly means you eat, then that is good enough. You are good enough.
Keep it simple. Plan to eat. You’re worth feeding.
