There will always be disrupting messages, practice tuning into your body instead of worrying.

You probably have seen an extreme food challenge.

Or perhaps you glanced at your kid’s screen and noticed people wolfing down insane amounts of food very quickly.

Let’s name this phenomenon for what it is – binge eating without guilt.

It’s likely that this type of behavior is giving an inappropriate message. Simply put, watching other people stuff themselves is not good for your health.

So should we ban these videos? Should we write to the creators of these videos and tell them to stop?

Here’s my perspective on what is appropriate action for you to take:

Stop tuning out, start tuning in.

1. Take a stand for personal food preferences by giving everyone food freedom!!!
2. By letting go of judgment towards others, you give yourself the chance to be free of judgment towards yourself. If you want to find other people without food judgment, check out Overeaters Anonymous.
3. There will always be arguments about the right way to eat food, are you going to get involved in everyone of these arguments?
4. It’s hard enough to respect your own body and taste preferences, focus on yourself first and be your own light.

The Proper Attitude Towards Extreme Food Challenges, My Musings & Commentary:

The respected newspaper Telegraph in the UK recently penned an article about extreme food challenges.

In this article they interviewed Dr. Sattar, Professor of Metabolic Medicine at the University of Glasgow, who said:

“It’s the wrong message to tell people that eating excess calories is fun to do”.

He goes on to say that people eat with their eyes and are triggered by what they see in their environment.

It’s the same thing with pornography, and violent video games and cartoons that promote sexuality at a young age.

There are certain things we would be better off not seeing, but people watch them anyways.

So what do you do? What’s the right thing to do?

What’s The Proper Attitude Towards Extreme Food Challenges?

Here’s my perspective which I’ll sum up below:

Let go of judgment, be your own light.

This means I would recommend:

• Don’t leave any comments
• Never tell someone they can’t watch
• Don’t criticize
• Never complain to YouTube
• Don’t watch their shows

Here is what I would recommend about the proper attitude towards extreme food challenges:

If you do find yourself in a situation or someone has binged, including yourself, ask them in a calm compassionate voice – “did eating that much feel good to you?”

Focus on listening to your body and really trying to tune in to take care of yourself, be mindful of your emotions, prioritize self-care including eating, and practicing your eating skills. These are many skills within the health at every size philosophy.

Basically I take a hands-off approach.

Why do I recommend a hands-off approach?

I recommend a hands-off approach for one reason – effectiveness.

Is it really effective to try to change someone else’s behavior?

How much time and energy and angry thinking will you devote? How much benefit will you gain by trying to change someone else’s behavior?

While there are many examples where we do need to change other people’s behavior like smoking cigarettes, we no longer allow people to just smoke cigarettes wherever they want because there is direct harm for bystanders.

With eating though, we all know that people will always have cameras and as long as these videos are getting views, someone will be doing food competitions.

• I would feel disgust at the amount of food
• Or I would feel sorry for these guys
• Always I would laugh at the preposterous amounts of foods they are eating
• I was curious about what they would eat in the next episode

And we all remember the show Man Versus Food. It was a good TV show. It was entertaining.

Now what happened? The host of the show Adam, his health got really bad and he had to stop the show. It turns out eating that much food all the time isn’t good for you.

Perhaps we can learn a lesson here.

There are always going to be diets. There are always going to be arguments about the ‘right way’ to eat.

What if we decided to not partake in these arguments and debates?

What if this was the proper attitude towards extreme food challenges?

I believe it is.

What if we decided to listen to our bodies and concern ourselves only with what was inside of our skins?

What if we made a conscious decision to tune out, and tune in instead?

Would our energy be spent more effectively?

I believe so.

What do you believe?