Glossary

Orthorexia

Orthorexia Nervosa is a type of eating disorder characterized by an extreme focus on “healthy” eating. When healthy eating becomes an obsession, the individual may start to cut out more and more foods, ingredients, and/or food groups from their diet. They may, for example, stop eating gluten (without a diagnosis of an allergy or celiac disease), any processed food, seafood or fish, all sugars, oils, and so on. People with Orthorexia Nervosa usually start with a few foods they won’t eat and then progress to more and more. With Orthorexia Nervosa, the desire for healthy eating begins to affect a person’s physical and psychosocial health. Even though the root cause is not a desire to lose weight, in advanced cases extreme weight loss can occur, similar to the weight loss seen in anorexia nervosa. In addition to the health risks associated with malnutrition and weight loss, the individual also faces psychological trauma and social difficulties.

Behavioral signs that a person might be struggling with Orthorexia Nervosa:

Constantly checking ingredient labels and nutritional information
Spending inordinate amounts of time on “health food” or nutritional sites, or similar social media sites (i.e. Instagram “healthy eating” groups)
An increase in concern about the health of ingredients
Increasing inability to eat certain kinds of foods and an increasing amount of “fear foods”
Cutting out an increasing number of food groups
Avoiding eating with others if they do not control the menu
Showing high levels of distress when “safe” or “healthy” foods aren’t available
Frequent “cleanses” where the person fasts or eats a specific diet intended to rid the system of “toxins”

(National Alliance for Eating Disorders, 2022)

Body Image

Body image includes both how you feel about your appearance and what you see when you look in the mirror. Often this mental image can be quite different than reality. Body image is more about how you feel than how you actually look. When you feel poorly about your appearance, you are more vulnerable to other mental disorders, such as anxiety and depression. A negative or poor body image is a small voice in your head telling you that your body is “wrong," and that your body should look a different way, or that your body “feels” faulty. These messages and feelings are irrational beliefs that your mind and our society’s diet culture may dictate to you. We are all genetically programmed to have bodies that are different shapes and sizes (this is known as body diversity or size diversity) – it can take time to accept and feel at home in your body’s natural size and shape. It takes work, but peace can be achieved and bad body image will eventually go away.

- Jen Petro-Roy from ANAD.org

Diet Culture

A system of beliefs that:

Worships thinness and equates it to health and moral virtue, which means you can spend your whole life thinking you’re irreparably broken just because you don’t look like the impossibly thin “ideal.”
Promotes weight loss as a means of attaining higher status, which means you feel compelled to spend a massive amount of time, energy, and money trying to shrink your body, even though the research is very clear that almost no one can sustain intentional weight loss for more than a few years.
Demonizes certain ways of eating while elevating others, which means you’re forced to be hyper-vigilant about your eating, ashamed of making certain food choices, and distracted from your pleasure, your purpose, and your power.
Oppresses people who don’t match up with its supposed picture of “health”, which disproportionately harms women, femmes, trans folks, people in larger bodies, people of color, and people with disabilities, damaging both their mental and physical health.

- Christy Harrison, MPH, RD, CDN

Body Shaming

The action or practice of expressing an aversion to an individual’s body shape or size; a form of bullying that can result in severe emotional trauma, especially at a young age. Body shaming can be done by parents, siblings, friends, enemies, peers, strangers, and even medical practitioners.

Negatively commenting about the size or shape of anyone’s body can be extremely damaging to them, potentially leading to low self-esteem, self-harm, and even mental health disorders, specifically body dysmorphic disorder and eating disorders. It often leads to comparison and shame and perpetuates the idea that people should be judged for their physical features. Sadly, body shaming occurs among both men and women of all different shapes and body sizes. Body shaming includes both criticisms of being “too fat” or “too skinny”, often picking on flaws that are completely irrelevant.

Thin Privilege

by virtue of being, or living in a body below a certain size, a person has greater access to resources and faces less discrimination in society versus a person whose body is above a certain size. People in larger bodies face consistent, systemic oppression – not just body-shaming from a few individuals but a culture that makes it difficult or impossible to find clothes & spaces that fit, healthcare that’s effective & non-discriminatory, equal access to employment, and all other basic human rights that we all deserve.

The term “thin privilege” is meant to highlight this systemic disparity, and to call out the fact that dignity, respect and equitable treatment shouldn’t be privileges reserved for smaller-bodied people at ALL – they should be a universal right afforded to everyone, no matter their size.

Having thin privilege doesn’t mean that you’ve never had any body-image issues, or that you’ve never struggled with disordered eating, or that you’ve never been bullied or shamed by an individual for your size. You can have thin privilege and also hate your body. Having thin privilege doesn’t even mean that you feel thin – the vast majority of people in diet culture NEVER feel thin, even those with thin privilege.

-Christy Harrison, Food Psych Podcast

Weight Cycling

The repeated loss and regain of body weight. Weight cycling is often referred to as “yo-yo” dieting. A weight cycle can range from small weight losses and gains (5-10 lbs. per cycle) to larger changes in weight (50 lbs. or more per cycle). Research links greater health risks to weight cycling versus an individual’s weight alone. Losing and regaining weight may have negative psychological effects as well.

Fatphobia/Fatphobic

A societal or cultural phenomenon that discriminates, oppresses, judges, or makes assumptions about a person's health, habits, or lifestyle based on the size, shape, weight, or appearance of their body. This belief equates “fatness” to laziness or lack of self-control and views an individual’s weight as a “personal choice”. This form of discrimination exists in the workplace, healthcare settings (known specifically as Medical Fatphobia), education, personal relationships, the media, clothing stores, and elsewhere. This pervasive belief views people in larger bodies as “lazy”, “ugly,” or somehow less of a person. Fatphobia can be directed toward one’s own self as a fear of weight gain or becoming “fat” or can be directed toward someone else as judgment, insult, or bullying. Fatphobia is directly involved in the increase of disordered eating thoughts and behaviors and the rise in a number of eating disorders.

Related to weight stigma.

Medical Fatphobia

A type of fat shaming/body shaming that specifically occurs in a medical setting, where healthcare practitioners aim these weight biases toward their patients in larger bodies. This form of weight stigma is often learned in medical school (or before) and can cause healthcare providers to attribute a vast majority of pain, injuries, symptoms, diagnoses, sickness, and disease/risk of disease to a patient’s weight. Sadly, medical providers forget that their patients living in smaller bodies often suffer from the same exact challenges and complaints as their patients living in larger bodies. However, providers will offer multiple evidence-based treatment options to their patients in smaller bodies and will repeatedly offer only one option to their patients in larger bodies – lose weight. Even though nearly ALL the research shows that prescribing intentional weight loss: 1) is the biggest predictor of weight GAIN, and 2) is not a form of practicing Evidence Based Medicine (EBM). Medical fatphobia causes harm and creates challenges to the provider-patient relationship and is attributed to a lower quality of care. In certain circles, Medical Fatphobia is known as ‘the last acceptable bias.

(also known as Weight Bias in Healthcare)

Fear Foods

A term used to identify a food that is avoided due to fear, anxiety, shame, or guilt. A food can become fear food for several different reasons, including: fear of weight gain, calories, carbs, amount of fat or points it contains, nutrition facts, ingredients, preservatives, or because it's "fattening", all of which are due to diet culture.

You will know a Fear Food if:

• You cannot be around the food or keep it in your house because you fear you will "lose control" around it.

• You create rules about how much, when, or how often you're allowed to have the particular food.

• Stress/anxiety builds when you think about the food becoming available (example, going out to eat).

• You may begin avoiding social situations where a food that causes anxiety might be available.

• You experience guilt, shame, or feel the need to, "fix", "undo", burn off, change how you will eat in the future, or rid your body of the food after you eat it.

Challenging and overcoming fear foods is an integral part to developing a healthy relationship with food, eating, and one's body; this includes viewing all foods as neutral, not "good" or "bad", "safe" or "unsafe".

Normal Eating

What is Normal Eating?

Normal Eating is going to the table hungry and eating until you are satisfied. It's being able to choose the food you like and eat it and truly get enough of it - not just stop eating because you think you should. Normal eating is being able to give some thought to your food selection so you get nutritious food, but not being so wary and restrictive that you miss out on enjoyable food. Normal eating is giving yourself permission to eat sometimes because you are happy, sad, or bored, or just because it feels good. Normal eating is three meals a day, or four, or five, or it can be choosing to munch along the way. It's leaving some cookies on the plate because you know you can have some more again tomorrow, or it's eating more now because they taste so wonderful. Normal eating is overeating at times, feeling stuffed and uncomfortable. And it can be undereating at times and wishing you had more. Normal eating is trusting your body to make up for your mistakes in eating. Normal eating takes up some of your time and attention but keeps its place as only one important area of your life. In short, normal eating is flexible. It varies in response to your hunger, your schedule, your proximity to food, and your feelings.

- Ellyn Satter

Person in a Larger Body

"A phrase that people in the anti-diet movement use as a value-neutral way of saying someone's body is larger than the so-called "normal range" on the BMI chart and that there's nothing morally or medically wrong with their body size. We use the term person in a larger body to avoid using the words "overweight" and "obese" due to their troubling history born out of oppressive beliefs about body size that stigmatize higher weight people and treat body size like a disease. This weight stigma is actually likely to be more harmful to people's health than their weight itself. In fact, weight itself is not "bad for health" the way we've been told in diet culture ... Instead of using stigmatizing "O words," I typically use the phrase "larger bodies," "higher weight," or "people who wear plus size" to emphasize the fact that body size is a neutral trait."

- Christy Harrison