The Truth About Toxic Health Habits: Wellness Gone Wrong
Introduction
If you feel like you are a slave to your wellness routine, this post is for you. You are trying your best to do everything right for your health and body goals, but you aren’t making progress, or you feel like it shouldn’t be this hard. You may be wondering if your wellness behaviors have turned into toxic health habits. Everyone else has found “the thing” that has gotten them the results that they wanted. But they are all different things. And you, because of your discipline and dedication, are doing ALL of those things, but you are on a hamster wheel of effort, and your body isn’t changing that much. You’re not failing; your habits might be failing you.
High-achieving, perfectionistic women often have the curse of trying harder than everyone else, without much to show for it. How can others work half as hard, but still have your dream body and better health at that? It’s so not fair.
How Healthy Becomes Toxic for High Achievers
The perfectionistic, high-achieving woman sees the world as a system of input-output: you get out of something what you put into it. Do more, get more. Try more, win more. It is very straightforward. This is called a positive feedback loop: adding something to the system upregulates the system and drives a process forward.
The body is constantly seeking homeostatic balance. It has a tight window of variance for most body processes, and so it upregulates and downregulates processes to keep things like blood glucose, blood pressure, PH, and temperature within a healthy window. This requires positive feedback loops and negative feedback loops.
The Body as a Thermostat
Think of a thermostat with an upper and lower temperature set so that you have a comfortable range. When the temperature dips below that range, the thermostat kicks up the heat to bring it up. When the temperature is above it, it turns on the air conditioning to bring it down. Adding a lot of heat to the room won’t make a permanent change to the room temperature. There are mechanisms in place to keep it within a certain range.
The body is just like that. We can’t just add an indefinite amount of effort into the system because it has mechanisms in place to compensate for it. So, at some point, it’s all just wasted effort. You are past the point of getting results from your effort. You are just holding the door open in the middle of a snowstorm, letting the furnace run wild, not seeing any results of the system working so hard.
Where is Your Energy Going?
So, in my opinion, behaviors can become toxic healthy habits for high-achieving women because they are putting extraordinary amounts of effort into something and not seeing results. Then, they start blaming and shaming themselves for not doing enough. When really, all they need to do is zoom out and see where all that energy is being wasted, and rein in some things so they can spend their energy on the things that will truly get them the results they want.
For the remainder of this post, I want to discuss some current wellness trends as if I am talking to a high-achieving woman. She is doing all the things and trying so hard to do it all right, but is not seeing the health and body composition results she wants to see. I’ll discuss the motivations behind these behaviors, why you might feel stuck in these behaviors, and some alternatives to consider.
I won’t tell you to stop doing anything that you feel is benefiting you or that you enjoy. If something is working, no need to change it or defend it. If something is working and you like it, by all means, keep doing it! But if you feel like a slave to this thing, and you feel like you can’t get off the hamster wheel without crashing and burning, let’s look at some other approaches that might better work with your system.
Toxic Healthy Habit #1 – Excessive Fasting
Why It Hooks You
Intermittent fasting, time-restricted eating, and extended fasting are exploding in popularity as they become more researched and health professionals start to discuss the potential benefits of fasting. It’s so alluring: Promises of fat loss, improved longevity, and activating autophagy to “clean up” the body. If you are a high-achieving perfectionist, I bet you launched yourself onto the fasting train. It’s the ultimate promise that you can finally discipline and control yourself into health. And it works…for a while.
After you have settled into a rhythm with it, you might find yourself a bit leaner, with a lower appetite and an enormous amount of pride that you can just wait out hunger, and it goes away. Finally, a solution that outsmarts your body!
Why You Feel Stuck
But then did you start to feel a little stuck? Did you add an hour or two to your daily fast to get a little smaller? Did you start to feel nervous about eating outside the home, or on other people’s schedules? Have you ever crammed food in your face at 5:58 pm because you knew you were about to start a 24-hour fast, and you didn’t know if you could make it? Did you start to experiment with going a day, or two, or three, without eating, and get a little addicted to the high of restricting?
I’m not discounting the potential benefits of fasting in small doses in line with your body’s needs and boundaries. But, I think it can get to be a very toxic wellness trend very quickly for high-achieving, perfectionistic women. It’s a slippery slope, and speaking from experience, it can take a very, very long time for the body to feel okay again after it goes too far.
What if you took all the discipline that you used to not eat and used it to eat consistently?
Toxic Health Habit #2 – Tracking Every Bite, Step, and Macro Out of Fear
Why It Hooks You
I fully believe in strategically using data to inform our health decisions; it can be helpful and empowering, and does not have to come from a disordered place. But…it can go there pretty quickly. For high achievers, putting numbers to health is very attractive. It feels safe to quantify our inputs and outputs, and it allows us to tweak and change things. It appeals to the more controlling and perfectionistic parts of us.
Why You Feel Stuck
If you only feel safe with the numbers, if those are not available, how do you make decisions? Did you start to fear losing your progress without that control? Do you have anxiety when you can’t track? Do you believe that if you are not hitting a certain metric, you are not as good? Will you write stories about your worthiness being tied to your ability to get gold stars on all your data boxes each day? Do you think that letting go of this data means letting go of your health?
What if you focused your tracking on just a few metrics that have the most impact? What would happen if you used a check-in with your body’s intuition to help inform the data, instead of using the data to silence your intuition?
Toxic Healthy Habit #3 – Eating “Clean” at All Costs
Why It Hooks You
If you are a health-conscious perfectionist, nothing could be more seductive than the pursuit of the perfect Clean Eating Diet. It speaks to your deeply internalized belief that clean equals healthy, moral, and good. It appeals to your desire to have complete control over your environment and to protect yourself from the dangers of chemicals, heavy metals, mold, pesticides, pollutants, and artificial ingredients.
Why You Feel Stuck
It feels incredible to transition to a lox-tox diet and lifestyle, and I am not discounting the critical health implications of any of these things. But what happens when the fear of the thing becomes more toxic than the thing itself? What happens when your identity and sense of safety are tied to a way of eating, and that way of eating isn’t always accessible? What happens when you are so afraid of food that you literally create food sensitivities out of a fight-or-flight response to eating itself? When your identity is tied to being the healthy one, who are you when you are not in control of your environment?
What if you expanded your definition of healthy nutrition to be a spectrum rather than binary? What would have to change to start making empowered and educated choices that come from love and self-respect rather than fear?
Toxic Healthy Habit #4 – Cutting Foods “Just to Be Safe”
Why It Hooks You
Food elimination comes from almost all sides of the wellness world, and every camp has a different list of things that need to be cut out. Dairy, gluten, corn, soy, sugar, meat, fish, eggs, fruit, grains, legumes, nightshades, cruciferous vegetables, nuts, and oils are all foods that commonly get eliminated from diets because of their purported health consequences. Depending on which camps you are coming from, you probably have your ranking of which of these are the worst for us and which are the best.
Why You Feel Stuck
Unfortunately, if you listen to too many people, you really aren’t left with much at all to eat. And, as you cut foods out, your body downregulates the digestive enzymes required to digest that food, so you get more sensitive to it. If you cut out food in hopes of eliminating bloating, weight gain, or inflammation, you are terrified to add these foods back in because you fear these symptoms returning. You are probably overwhelmed and confused by all the conflicting information.
What if you viewed a healthy diet as including as many nourishing foods as possible rather than as few? If you are genuinely sensitive to many foods, could you work directly with your health care team to have targeted support rather than picking up rules here and there from wellness influencers?
Conclusion: You Don’t Need These Toxic Health Habits
It’s so easy for health habits to turn toxic, especially for women like you who pour so much heart, discipline, and high standards into every goal. The same dedication that makes you successful can become the same thing that traps you in cycles of stress, fear, and rigidity.
Behaviors like fasting longer and longer, counting every calorie, or cutting out entire food groups can start from a place of wanting health and relishing control. But for high-achieving, perfectionistic women, these habits can quietly become a slippery slope, shifting from helpful tools into rigid rules that create anxiety, guilt, and a loss of connection with your body.
If you’ve recognized yourself in any of these patterns of toxic health habits, know that you haven’t failed. You’ve been trying to take care of yourself with the tools you believed you needed. But it might be time to ask yourself whether your wellness practices are truly serving you, or whether they’re sneakily stealing your health.
There’s room for a healthier way forward that is built on flexibility, self-respect, and compassion. You deserve wellness practices that nourish you in body, mind, and spirit rather than ones that exhaust and punish you. You deserve not to be run by toxic health habits. What if you took all the effort and discipline you’ve used to follow these rules and applied that toward consistently and adequately nourishing yourself?
Now, I’d love to hear from you: Have you ever felt like a “healthy” habit became toxic for you?
Wishing you well,
Meghan
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