The Atlantic
Your weird pandemic eating habits are probably fine.
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For the first 34 years of my life, I always ate three meals a day. I never thought much about it the routine was satisfying, it fit easily into my life, and eating three meals a day is just what Americans generally do. By the end of last summer, though, those decades of habit had begun to erode. The time-blindness of working from home and having no social plans left me with no real reason to plod over to my refrigerator at any specific hour of the day. To cope, I did what many Americans have done over the past year: I quasi-purposefully fumbled around for a new routine, and eventually I came up with some weird but workable results and with Big Meal.
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Disordered eating is sneakier than you think. What may seem healthy might actually be problematic behavior.
Every time I start to feel hopeful that the anti-diet movement is gaining traction and more people are finally starting to reject toxic diet culture, reality seems to rain on my parade.
Whether it’s teenage “wellness” influencers using TikTok to promote massively restrictive eating plans or a magazine headline touting ways to outsmart your hunger cues, the truth is that disordered eating is everywhere. What is worse, it’s often praised as health-conscious or virtuous.
Depriving your body of the food it wants and needs is anything but healthy. Just because we’ve normalized things like chewing gum to avoid eating, or religiously weighing your food and logging it into an app, doesn’t mean those things are actually good for us. And while it’s fair to say that silly “diet tricks” are pushed on us all the time, it’s also true t