Food Language
This week on The Athlete Degree’s instagram we covered three different topics related to the language surrounding food. The first post highlighted five positive things food can do for us. The second was a reel discussing how to filter the content you see online about food/fueling. Lastly, there were multiple posts on how to positively discuss fueling and what to avoid on social media.
The importance of navigating positive language around food is to improve your relationship with fueling. We often have negative thoughts or feelings surrounding food due to the media, diet culture, peers, and comparison. Social media makes it hard enough for us to avoid self-comparison with the strangers we see online, now there is a surge of influencers promoting diets, weight loss, and showing “what I eat in a day” videos. How you are effected by content online is strictly your responsibility. The intentions of the creators does not necessarily matter, but how you perceive the content and how to makes you feel is on you and also on you to change that.
So much of what we see online lacks content, so we can’t give a quick one minute video on “what I eat in a day” as much credit to affecting how you feel about yourself. We don’t have enough information about their day, their job, their nutritional needs, and/or goals to determine if we can compare ourselves to them or not. But, we do it anyway. Remind yourself that we are all different with different needs, so taking inspiration can be healthy, but comparing every aspect of yourself to these videos online, including what you look like, is detrimental to your mental health. Be aware and make the decision to protect yourself.
The five highlights of food posted first this week on The Athlete Degree are to demonstrate what we should we searching in terms of food and fueling. Often our thoughts sound like:
“food makes me gain weight”
“I don’t want to go out to eat with friends because I’ll mess up my diet”
“I’m not eating ____ because they aren’t”
“I ate too much last night so I am skipping breakfast”
“My workout was really hard so I can have ____ tonight”
We need to aim to change our language we use in regards to fueling ourselves or we will start to believe it. Food is not the enemy and you need to remind yourself of that. Food does so many wonderful things for your mind and body, it is more harmful to deprive yourself of food than it is to eat something that may not be the most nutritious. Make your goal this week to restructure your thoughts when something negative about food pops in your mind and use the instagram posts on the Athlete Degree as an example of where to start.
When it comes to what we see on social media, we want to be prepared with the right questions to ask ourself before consuming media relating to health and fitness. Specifically for our fueling habits, there is an outstanding amount of misinformation or “fluff” content out there that can be hidden in “entertainment”. Unfortunately, due to the media and human nature we have always been surrounded by diet culture and comparison. Below are a few considerations for you to ponder in relation to fitness and health content in order to decide if it is helping you or hurting you:
Is this inspiring me to take care of myself or making me judge myself for not being like them?
Am I getting meal ideas and applying them or consistently saving them to never be used?
Is what I am seeing making me feel worse about myself and body image because I am comparing myself to others?
Are the people showing me this information doing this themselves or portraying an image?
Are the people providing me this information giving me the whole picture and being realistic/transparent?
Can I apply this to my life in a realistic way to feel better?
Is this type of media making me feel better or worse about myself?
Have I increased the negative thoughts about myself overtime due to this kind of media?
There could be more, but no matter the content make sure what you are consuming is not causing you harm and if it is, choose to unfollow.
Lastly, our words carry weight. Whether you have experienced this or not, you need to trust that your words can have a lasting impact on the people around you. If you are insecure about what you are eating or how much you are eating, ask yourself why?
We are all doing our best and keeping ourselves alive and well. If you are struggling to know what to eat, seek out the advice from a nutritionist or trusted source. Where the importance of our words around food lay, is the impact it can have on not only ourselves, but others.
If you are commenting on someone’s food choices or quantity of food in a negative way, consider that they could be struggling to get enough food at home, keep weight on their body, or are recovering from an eating disorder. Either way, receiving comments on how much food you are eating may have a negative impact on how you continue to eat, so think about what it could do to others.
The goal is to shift our mindset to be as positive as possible regarding most things. When it comes to food it can feel hard, but do your best to shift negative thoughts to reminding yourself of the beautiful possibilities food can have for you and your body!
