Hunger is a problem, not a trend

No one is solely scared of weight gain – on its own it’s meaningless, but one can be scared of what they believe weight gain will turn them into (honestly, me. I’m working on this.) What makes weight gain scary is what we associate with it, and we learn these associations from our culture. Often people are viewed as either “lean” or “overweight”, with no in-between. Diet culture did this to us. Internalised fatphobia is real and it often makes itself known by being stressed or punishing yourself when you think you have gained the tiniest bit of weight and view yourself as “fatter”. First of all, what’s wrong with NOT being lean and toned? You may associate weight with health and you're therefore afraid of becoming "unhealthy": whatever your weight is when you're eating unrestricted, doing joyful movement and enjoying life is the right and healthy one for you.

Even if you don’t consider yourself a dieter, the diet mentality is familiar to most of us:

Food is either good or bad, healthy or unhealthy… and you need to “be good” around food. Whereas, the truth is: this kind of mentality only fuels the fire of obsessive thinking about food. Every day is a constant struggle in my eating disorder recovery as I am still stuck in a toxic way of thinking regarding what and how much I eat. This toxicity manifests itself in subtle restrictions that I have become so used to that I don’t even realise I’m doing it. Social media and diet culture romanticise hunger. They make it seem as though we are supposed to feel hunger, either between meals or particularly in the evening, because it proves that we are being successful – that weight loss is on the horizon. The veracity of this is non-existent. If you’re fortunate enough to be able to eat and eat enough when you’re hungry, do it. That’s how you truly take care of your body. Hunger is a problem, not a trend.

This is still something I need to constantly be reminding myself about too, as something that I have been brainwashed by is if you have a big lunch, you need to have a small dinner – or vice versa. If you’re getting a takeaway for dinner one night, then you should maybe skip lunch that day or maybe just have a light snack. This is something that many people have been indoctrinated by because hunger / not feeling full has almost been romanticised.

I’m still coming to terms with this and, relatively recently, I set myself a challenge of bringing a proper substantial lunch with me to work, and where I would normally have a small dinner, I made myself then cook a substantial meal. This resulted in my body feeling extremely hungry, much hungrier than I would have been if I had have continued to eat smaller meals. This is because once you start eating adequately again, your body not only needs your basic amount of energy, but it must compensate for all the food it has been lacking. This is completely normal as your body is healing itself after a period of restriction. Something else that started to happen to me was bloating more than usual – I noticed this within 24 hours of setting myself this challenge! This is also (obviously) due to your body having to learn to digest food properly again due to being too used to a significantly lower intake of food and thus resulting in a much slower metabolism and digestion rate.

It must be noted that these symptoms can happen to anyone regardless of their size.

Drastically reducing your food intake or being in a calorie deficit that is too low for your body, especially for a prolonged period of time, is going to make your body work more to control what is happening. It’s completely normal (whatever normal even is). Yo-yo dieting or having an eating disorder has made your body go through a lot. It’s not at its optimal state and therefore may change and fluctuate as it gets used to you treating it as you should have been. It's fine. This is coming from something that I am going through right now, and I want to spread awareness about it. Diet culture is prevalent, but it's not normal - it's just now an inherent part of our society that needs to be eradicated.