🧠 Is It Clean Eating or Disordered Eating? The Fine Line Many Adults Walk Without Realising

It’s 2025, and we’re still living in a time where wellness culture is packaged with a pretty pastel bow and sold as “health.” If you’re anything like me and obsessed with a good docuseries, you may have come across Apple Cider Vinegar—an Australian series that peeled back the glossy curtain on the modern wellness industry. For me, it brought back flashbacks of uni lectures about social media and its creeping influence on medical information (which, ironically, we now need to use ourselves to reach and help people).

But what really stood out? That uncomfortable overlap between wellness trends and disordered eating.

🚩 When Wellness Goes Too Far

There’s a very thin line between taking care of your health and falling into obsessive patterns. Wellness culture often dresses up restriction with new names: clean eating, detoxing, biohacking, primal, intermittent fasting, anti-inflammatory, intuitive-but-only-if-it’s-low-carb.

But at the core, many of these practices are just disordered eating with better PR.

We’ve seen this before: the fruitarian diet, the carnivore diet, keto, juice cleanses—the list goes on. They all promise magic results with the illusion of control and purity. But for most people, they become a slippery slope into disordered habits.

😬 “Clean Eating” Isn’t Always So Clean

Disordered eating doesn’t always look like what we were taught in health class. Sometimes, it’s being:

• Obsessed with only eating “clean,” “whole,” or “organic” food—to the point where anything else feels dirty or wrong.

• Feeling intense guilt after eating a meal that doesn’t match your self-imposed rules.

• Secretly bingeing after restricting too much during the day.

• Fixating on how your body looks after eating one food that strays from your plan.

• Rigidly following eating patterns with no room for flexibility, and feeling anxious or needing to “compensate” (with exercise or further restriction) when things don’t go to plan.

This isn’t health. It’s stress dressed up as discipline.

🍽️ Why Flexibility Is the Foundation of True Wellness

Let’s call it out: all those trendy diets that go viral on social media work in the short term because they force your body into a calorie deficit. That’s it. But they all carry risks.

The carnivore diet, for instance, eliminates fibre almost entirely. It’s high in saturated fat and can increase the risk of heart disease and colon cancer. The fruit-only diet? There have been documented deaths—because our bodies cannot survive on fruit alone.

The long-term solution? A balanced, flexible way of eating that:

• Gives your body a variety of nutrients (including those all-important phytochemicals and fibre)

• Supports your gut, heart, hormones, immune system, and mental health

• Allows you to enjoy life without obsessing over every bite

• Helps you eat in alignment with your goals without constant stress or guilt

👩‍⚕️ Rebuilding Trust with Food—You're Not Alone

If you’ve found yourself stuck in the all-or-nothing cycle, or if you feel anxious when you’re not eating according to your “rules,” you’re not broken—and you’re not alone. Many of these behaviours are subtle, socially praised, and often encouraged in wellness spaces.

Working with a dietitian (especially one who gets it) can help you:

• Unpack years of confusing food rules

• Understand the science of what your body actually needs

• Build a nourishing, enjoyable eating pattern that works for your life

Final Thought:

Healthy eating doesn’t mean perfect eating. It means flexible, balanced choices that support your body and your life.

Let’s stop glorifying rigid food rules—and start celebrating the freedom that comes from nourishing your body without fear.