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9 Women Get Brutally Honest About the Parts of Weight Loss We Don't Talk AboutWeight loss can be an amazing, positive thing, but it's not all #selflove and #bodygoals |
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But there is a dark side to weight loss. Something you don't see in all of those carefully staged Instagram photos of paleo mac 'n' cheese and perfect body transformations. Personally, when I lost about 40 pounds a few years back, the dark side was the insane amount of compliments. When people would tell me I looked amazing, I would always think, "Did I really look that awful before?" I'd recently achieved a huge promotion and was in the middle of major career success, and all anyone could talk about was my weight loss.
In other cases, diets like clean eating or veganism can hide bigger issues like eating disorders -- there's even a medical term for this, orthorexia.
"Orthorexia is defined as an unhealthy obsession with healthy food," Dr. Stevan Bratman, who coined the term, says. "It's not the diet that is orthorexia, it's the diet that could lead to it. The more extreme or restrictive the diet, the more likely it could lead to orthorexia."
And in a recent, horrifying turn, a 25-year-old bodybuilding mom died of a protein overdose. Meegan Hefford died in June after consuming mass amounts of protein to prepare for a bodybuilding competition, PerthNow reports. Hefford had been eating protein-rich foods over the last few months of her life in addition to drinking protein shakes and taking vitamin supplements, not knowing she had a genetic disorder that prevented her body from breaking down the protein.
Behind the motivating blog posts and photos, there are things to look out for. Click to learn what you might be missing when you're planning to drop a dress size.
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