When Healthy Goes Wrong: Exercise, Nutrition and the Need to Earn Rest
For a long time now, I've seen people in my clinic who, on paper, are some of the healthiest people you could meet: regular exercisers with above average fitness, a healthy body weight and a diet built around whole foods and the occasional treat.
And yet they've run into trouble with their health, whether that's joint issues, chronic digestive problems, pain, headaches, hormone symptoms or fatigue.
What strikes me is how similar their personalities are. They tend to be highly motivated, type A personalities who are also very kind and generous with their time. They care immensely about others and are often perfectionists. Yet their body isn't playing ball at the moment, and they're finding they can no longer keep up their usual standards, which feels immensely stressful to them.
Me time is "get healthy" time
In our sessions we often explore the pressure these clients put on themselves and the standards they set. One observation I've made is that the only time these clients do anything for themselves, it comes under the banner of healthy.
They go to the gym, get their 10,000 steps, batch cook, and go to yoga and Pilates, and it's all ticked off with the same diligence they bring to everything else in their lives.
What's often missing is self-compassion, along with rest, downtime, creativity and the simple permission to do nothing at all.
Fun often has to be earned, so it gets slotted in as scrolling through dog reels at the end of the day or a few hours off at the weekend, which gives the illusion of balance when in reality 80 to 90% of their time is spent in regimented doing or looking after everybody else.
This is where your relationship with health can become skewed, because it becomes strongly associated with control and chasing a sense of safety.
Are your healthy habits coping mechanisms?
One thing I help clients do is step back and reflect on their healthy habits.
Ideally, our daily choices around health are based on understanding our needs, listening to our body's feedback and adapting things to the load we're carrying in life at the time.
This becomes difficult if some of these habits are doing a second job: helping you feel safe, giving you an illusion of control and keeping you one step ahead of whatever you don't want to feel.
It's also tough if you don't trust yourself or your relationship with food, exercise and your body.
A common pattern here is chasing a particular ideal or a kind of perfectionism, which leads to undereating and overexercising, but the opposite can also be true.
FYI, the health industry itself capitalises on this immensely, presenting ideals on your newsfeed, triggering "compare and despair" and dangling the carrot of the next thing you should do to be healthy.
I've seen many situations where a degree of self-sabotage and overindulgence features regularly, keeping people distracted. Each day they climb back onto the hamster wheel and start running to undo their slip-ups, always fighting their way back to that health halo.
What this might look like
Exercising excessively and never sitting still, even when you're injured and tired, because it feels like you have to.
Resisting rest and recovery, even when signs of burnout and physical symptoms are present.
Hitting numbers compulsively, so that step counts, calories, split times and weights lifted determine success and failure.
Snacking, comfort eating and sad wine drinking, then putting corrective measures in place, on a loop. This isn't an occasional, celebratory indulgence. It's regular eating and drinking in a trance to escape feelings, followed by the penance: an extra-long run, skipping breakfast or a strict week of "being good".
How can you tell if healthy has become unhealthy?
There are three signs that your healthy habits might be coping mechanisms.
There's rarely a choice, because these are compulsions, and fear kicks in when your routine is compromised in any way.
You struggle to adapt or be more flexible, because these are process addictions. They need to take place for you to be healthy, or so your mind tells you.
They're driven by guilt, blame, anxiety and shame, and you don't trust your body's ability to be healthy without being micromanaged by you every day.
What to do about it
Once clients understand how they've been coping, it often becomes much easier to contemplate change. We take this slowly, understanding how intricately these habits are linked with safety and self-worth.
From there I teach them to feel comfortable and safe in stillness and in doing less, so they can allow the emotions that come up when they slow down or put their own needs first.
Most clients experience fear at first, but consistent mind-body practices and regular pauses help them befriend this emotion as it arises in the body. Staying with it for a couple of minutes at a time can eventually mean they no longer need the coping mechanism, and healthy habits become intuitive again.
Here are a few ways to start the process:
Scale back. Start to reduce your commitments, both socially and at work, in a way that feels realistic, and gradually build more downtime into your day.
Pause. Take a few moments throughout the day to sit still and simply be with whatever comes up, even if it's only for a couple of minutes at a time.
Come into the body. Our primal emotions, such as fear, sadness and anger, are generated in the body, which is why I'm a huge fan of somatic practices, where you sit and gently explore what's happening inside.
It might be symptoms or pain, an unease in the gut or a slight tightness in the chest or throat, and if we stay with it rather than running from it, the system begins to settle and regulate, because we're finally listening to ourselves, our needs and our body.
Try this. If you'd like somewhere to start, settle in with Oliver James Jenkin's guided meditation, Nowhere to Go, No One to Be, an 18 minute invitation to stop doing and simply be.
If this sounds familiar, you don't have to untangle it on your own. I explore these patterns with clients in one-to-one nutritional therapy consultations and inside the Mindful Body Method, which you can try free for seven days.
