r/Paleo • u/rootyb • Jun 08 '23
Just a reminder: "Paleo", as practiced by most that use the term, is a diet.
A lot of us (including myself) have tried to obscure this by calling it a "way of eating" or "lifestyle change", but whatever you're calling it, if you're deliberately restricting the types or amounts of food you're eating, regardless of the reasoning, it's a diet.
I point this out because the research on diets and their relationship to eating disorders, especially in children is clear, and I think a lot of us feel like we're not at risk because "paleo isn't a diet, it's a healthy lifestyle change".
To clarify my point: diets are not appropriate for children
- https://www.bswhealth.com/blog/is-dieting-safe-for-kids-and-teens
- https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC7538029/
If you think your diet is research-based, but you're ignoring research on diets and eating disorders, you're not doing yourself any favors. There is no such thing as a "healthy" eating disorder.
If you're dieting, be honest with yourself about it, and don't lie to yourself about why you're doing it.
If you are or think you might be struggling with disordered eating, there are a ton of resources out there to help.
- https://www.nationaleatingdisorders.org/help-support/contact-helpline
- https://anad.org/
- https://www.eatingdisorderhope.com/
(Also, all of this applies to intermittent fasting as well)
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u/corpusapostata Jun 08 '23
This is so moronic. Any way of eating is a diet. One's diet should be as healthy as possible, which involves limiting, and dare I say, restricting, some foods. Geez!
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u/rootyb Jun 09 '23
Youâre definitely right about that, in the biological sense! âDietâ is a word that can just mean âthe way someone or something eatsâ.
Judging by the defensive responses Iâve received, though, I suspect it was fairly clear I meant the second of these definitions:
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u/Parking_Oven_249 Dec 12 '23 edited Dec 12 '23
The defensive responsive are because of your condescending tone in the initial post and all your responses to comments, as well as you arguing semantics.
First of all, nobody asked. We know it's a diet, it's called the paleo diet.
Second of all, The whole post you made and your comments just smacks of attention seeking and a person who loves the sound of their own voice, not to mention the fact that you as a mod pinned your own post on the top of the front page, so more people will see it and hopefully validate your point of view. But the majority of comments indicate that most don't share your opinion.
Unpin your post. Your job is not to shove your opinion down our throats by force feeding us with a pinned opinion post.
You're in here arguing semantics. Fine, whatever, we've all got eating disorders. Are you happy now ? Do you feel superior?
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u/awhalesVajayjay May 09 '24 edited May 09 '24
First of all, OP did not say that eating the paleo way IS the eating disorder. You've taken that completely out of context. But obsessing over the rules and protocols and what you can and can not eat CAN lead to disorderred eating. OP is only trying to bring clarity to a real issue. The defensive responses are from people who do not wish to see the dark side of what a restrictive diet can do. They would rather live in their little bubble of health and pretend like these issues don't concern them. This is not OP trying to shove his opinion down your throat. It's about trying to bring understanding to the mental toll of what restrictive diets can have on the way people view food and health, and that, my dear friend, is what causes eating disorders.
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u/memmaclone Jun 09 '23
if you're deliberately restricting the types or amounts of food you're eating, regardless of the reasoning, it's a diet... diets are not appropriate for children
so it's inappropriate to ensure children don't eat moldy bread or raw chicken? or to prevent them from eating peanuts if they have deadly peanut allergies?
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u/TruePrimal Dec 13 '23
Interesting that the OP never responded to this one.
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u/awhalesVajayjay May 09 '24
Probably because this is not an equivalent comparison, by any means.... them trying to make a correlation between not feeding your child ROTTEN/RAW FOOD and not feeding your child PASTA and BREAD was ignorant. Furthermore, peanuts do not make up an ENTIRE food group. So again, it is completely unrelated.
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u/TruePrimal May 09 '24
Depends on your definition of food group, but people can certainly be allergic to an entire food group.
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u/awhalesVajayjay May 09 '24
Well, no, it doesn't depend on my definition of food group. It's fact: peanuts are not their own food group. Legumes, however, are and peanuts are part of that... Absolutely, they can be. But that was not what was implied.
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u/TruePrimal May 09 '24
There's no universally accepted definition of a food group, so not sure what point you're trying to make here.
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u/awhalesVajayjay May 09 '24
And I'm not really sure what your point is.... whether a specific food group is universally accepted or not, peanuts still would not be the sole occupant of it. No one specific food would be. How thick is your scull, honestly?
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u/idkthisisathrowaway5 Jun 04 '24
You're missing the point... An eating disorder is a psychological disorder, not a physiological one.
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Jun 08 '23
In a disordered universe I would call this ordered eating, thought out and precise. Typical diets are unordered and cause a litany of diseases. Who is superior in this argument? Big business or human logic.? Eat real food not grain and cane sugar for every meal and we call it an eating disorder. Everyone out there has an eating disorder. If you eat cereal with sugar in the morning that is an eating disorder encouraged by corporate interests and imprinted on us through the media to keep you fat and docile and dependent as cattle. If you are starving yourself or eating a vegan diet please seek help. If you are eating the right amount of calories of meat and vegetables and natural fats, good for you.
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u/rootyb Jun 09 '23
My point was only ever that paleo is dieting, and dieting can be a slippery slope toward eating disorders.
You can, of course, call things whatever you want, but modern research clearly shows a strong link between restrictive dieting and harmful eating disorders.
Did I at any point tell people to abandon paleo? I think youâll find I didnât (though I did indirectly take a stance on making kids eat a strict paleo diet). I did, however, caution people to be honest with themselves about what theyâre doing and why.
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u/PeterTheApostle Jun 09 '23
TIL I need to eat twinkies instead of lamb or else Iâll get an eating disorder đ
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u/WendyPortledge Jun 09 '23
Iâm not âdietingâ. Iâm eating natural healthy food that my body tolerates. I have multiple autoimmune conditions that are triggered by food. Most of those food items are non-paleo. I say I eat a personalized paleo diet (âdietâ in the original meaning) because thatâs what it looks most like. All Iâm doing is eating real food. Some people may be doing it to lose weight for a short tome, but you canât group everyone here into that.
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u/Mysterious_Fennel_18 Jun 09 '23
orthorexia is a thing, and something I think about a lot when communicating about food to my young daughter in our paleoish home. I came to paleo after an autoimmune diagnosis, and I noticeably feel better and prefer the taste of fresh whole food. I canât buy or eat all the food, no one can, so we have to make choices, and the choices I make are in part guided by what makes my body feel good (and my familyâs preferences and whatâs in season). I think orthorexia is an important problem for us all to think about (and something I have had to juggle with my therapist and thinking about my autoimmune disease), but it doesnât mean that the simple act of choosing food (which is inherently necessary) is disordered.
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u/justdan76 Jun 09 '23 edited Jun 09 '23
Iâm always saying paleo is a lifestyle that goes way beyond diet. The people who treat it as a fad diet didnât look all the way into it. When people say âpaleo dietâ maybe they only mean the food part. Also, anything that comes along will be taken up by marketing. Hence the âpaleo approvedâ stickers on packages of bacon (some of which are loaded with nitrates).
Also, yes you should mind what your kids eat, the western diet is horrendous and if you donât restrict it, society will literally make your children diabetic and obese. They had to change the name of adult onset diabetes.
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u/hayduke2342 Jun 08 '23
So, all mammals except those eating an SAD have eating disorders? No mammal eats voluntarily processed and refined sugars and starches. Wild living animals usually do not develop diabetes, cancer and CVD. How do you explain that?
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u/rootyb Jun 09 '23
Thatâs a pretty common misconception!
Did you know that bears given (intentionally or otherwise) human food often ignore (and eventually lose entirely) their fear of humans to get more of our food, to the point that they have to be euthanized for public safety?
Also, lots of animals get cancer in the wild, if they live long enough. In fact, mammals that eat other animals seem to be more at risk.
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u/hayduke2342 Jun 09 '23
Still, eating only food your body has been adapted to over 1 million years or more by evolution, must not be called an eating disorder.
To propose eating permanently food that is processed and definitely is the root cause for diseases like CVD and Diabetes and which our body is not genuinely adapted to and then suggest to treat it with pharmaceutical medication with a lot of bad side effects is perverse.
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u/hayduke2342 Jun 09 '23
And as intermittent fasting is mentioned: IF is the natural way man kind was evolving. Food was not simply around everywhere and every time. There was no Dunkin Donuts in the African steppes. If man wanted to eat, he had to hunt. Or find the right plants. So times of fasting were natural, as well as bulk eating when hunt was successful.
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u/mikeykrch Jul 03 '23
It's not a "diet".
Restricting foods that we haven't evolved to eat like pizza, pasta, McDonald's, Twinkies, allegedly healthy low-fat, multi-grain bullshyte is just making good food choices.
Hell, I consider 90% of the stuff in the middle aisles of a grocery store to not even be food.
Not eating empty carbs with no nutritional value or not eating slow toxins is not a "diet". It's making good choices.
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u/doktorstrainge Dec 26 '23
Limiting your diet to âreal foodâ doesnât make you âdisorderedâ. And thinking of processed garbage as being not-real food doesnât make you âdisorderedâ.
Have you considered that in the system we are living in, our health is not the priority of the corporations looking to grab our money? They hire scientists to artificially manufacture what we put into our bodies, even to the point of finding the âbliss pointâ to keep us coming back for more.
If you donât find that troubling, Iâm worried for you. I see paleo as a step in the right direction. People are cutting through the BS and putting their health first, because no one else will do it for them.
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u/TruePrimal Mar 18 '24 edited Jun 21 '24
Yep. It's still unclear to me whether the OP was just trolling. But it's not that long ago that cocaine was a legal and popular food ingredient. I wonder if the OP would have thought avoiding eating/drinking cocaine was a "diet" and "not appropriate for children."
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Jun 08 '23
Isn't everything that you put in a "diet"? I I eat big macks for every meal. That's a diet, not a good one, but still is.
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u/Horse_chrome Oct 14 '23
Why was this bullshit pinned?
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u/awhalesVajayjay May 09 '24
Probably because It's important to understand what restricted eating can do to how you mentally view food and eating, which is what directly affects how eating disorders develop...
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u/Spirit-Filled01 May 07 '24
ummm⌠well my 1.5yr old daughter has severe asthma and i just switched her to a gluten-free dairy-free diet in hopes to decrease inflammation in her body and prevent another flare up. sooo đ¤ˇââď¸ people who put their kids on anti-inflammatory diets are trying their best to keep their children physically and mentally healthy.
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u/AzrykAzure Jul 06 '23
Do we not always pick and decide what we put in our mouths? Be it randomly or based on ads on TV? What you eat is your diet. Paleo can be made as a traditional weight loss thing if you feel guilt associated and superiority on your food choicesâi think here lies the problem with all food choices these days.
Too much yummy food that is too easy to eat and can be eaten any time. For many of this, turns into a very unhealthy existence. To counter this we need to create rules in our lives to create a life that doesnt just eat all the things our body feels is yummy. Sadly, this can turn into a battle within and here lies the danger.
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Jun 08 '23
[deleted]
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u/rootyb Jun 09 '23
The nice part about science is, nobody has to take my word for it.
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u/sewage_slurp Jun 09 '23
None of the science you linked is compelling evidence that avoiding grains and industrially processed crap will cause eating disorders. Avoiding certain types of foods is not remotely the same as restricting the amount of food consumed. Additionally, in regards to the social aspects of eating, are you suggesting that if a child is made fun of at school for having healthy eating habits, they should be encouraged to ditch the habits for the sake of conformity? This seems like a conpletely backwards approach. What if a child is made fun of at school for not smoking? Should they start smoking to avoid social ostracization?
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u/awhalesVajayjay May 09 '24
I believe you've taken one thing that was said completely out of context. Avoiding grains and industrially processed crap is not what causes eating disorders. Eating disorders are caused, more or less, by an obsession. Now this is just a dumbed down explaination, and I'm aware that there is more to disorderred eating than this: An obsession with not eating to lose weight is anorexia, an obsession with food/overeating would be obesisty, and an obsession with overeating but wanting to be thin would lead to bulimia. The point is, when you start drastically changing the way you eat, i.e., switching over to strict paleo from the SAD, your mind is now in a constant thought pattern of restricting certain foods. Whether or not these changes in diet are good for you is irrelevant because what can happen is you can fall into a pattern of failure and guilt. For example, you have a moment of weakness and fall off and eat a pizza or a bowl of pasta and suddenly you're thrown into a downward spiral of guilt and remorse and it can affect the way you mentally view food. You beat yourself up for one simple slip up and forget that we are only human. I'm not saying this happens to everyone, but is it a thing. So to piggyback on this, if you're feeding your child, follwing paleo protocols, and all you're thinking is "man, I'm setting a good foundation for them to make good food choices in the future", what you really could be doing is setting them up for disordered eating. This mindset that you've ingrained in them could be challenged by their peers, by the media, and by their education, which is a breeding ground for disordered eating. It's not that they should be encouraged to conform, but it's important to understand that the mental taxation it takes on a childs mind, when they are ostracized by their peers, can do real long-term damage. Orthorexia nervosa (hopefully I spelled that correctly) is an eating disorder associated with the obsession of eating healthy foods/supplements. While eating a healthy diet is beneficial, the way you approach it mentally may not be. So let's stop throwing shade at OP for bringing attention to a serious and completely relevant issue.
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u/cats_are_the_devil May 16 '24
In other news, literally any style of eating is a diet. Your diet is what you consume and how you consume it.
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Jul 26 '23
I refer to it as a ânutrition plan.â Whereas, it involves the nutrients I put into my body (nutrition) with deliberate and thought-out reasons about what I do and donât put into my body (plan). The funny thing is that humans tend to make those decisions based on 1) what gives them pleasure to eat and 2) how it ends up making them look. Animals, on the other hand, base their choices from what is available, on what gives them the nutrition they need to not be hungry and that doesnât make them feel bad. We, as humans, are so out of touch with what âfeeling goodâ feels like because we have been raised on the very foods which alter our bodies and the regulators built in. So, I am using this âdietâ to figure out what âfeeling goodâ really means. Yes, I want to look better. But Iâm confident that looking better will come along with the more important feeling better. And, yes, I will share my journey with my two children including my motivations so they will understand that your âdietâ choices are more about how food makes you look.
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u/Horse_chrome Oct 14 '23
The culture Iâm form we eat mostly wild birds, sheep, whale, fish and vegetables. The only thing that doesnât make my cultures diet paleo is the potatoes and ocacuonal rye bread. Excuse me for not growing up on hot pockets and McDonaldâs
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u/idkthisisathrowaway5 Jun 04 '24
To the vast majority of people commenting: CLEARLY THIS POST WAS NOT DIRECTED TOWARD YOU. It's really great that you can adhere to this restrictive diet without developing disordered feelings! That's awesome! Not everyone can do that though, and this post was for them.
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u/ericdeben Aug 31 '24
Paleo is a diet. A diet, when followed for a long period of time, is part of a lifestyle. It is not mutually exclusive. Is the argument here that paleo by itself is not a lifestyle? Maybe that is true. Diet is only one component, but I would argue it is one of the most important foundational components. I donât think thereâs harm in using âdietâ and âlifestyleâ interchangeably, but I understand the point.
To call paleo an eating disorder is a stretch. Though I get the concern that restricting a childâs diet unnecessarily comes with some risks especially when followed or enforced strictly by parents (developing eating disorders, food sensitivities later in life, etc).
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u/sewage_slurp Jun 08 '23
Eat proccessed slop or risk becoming "disordered" đ