Many parents experience confusion, fear, worry, or frustration when their loved one wants to

choose a vegan or vegetarian diet during eating disorder recovery. While veganism or vegetarianism can often complicate recovery, it can also be an important or valid part of their child’s recovery journey. Here, you’ll learn some potential reasons for these choices, and in the process will hopefully offer insight and encourage compassionate understanding from families.

Some Questions You Might Have

• “Why can’t they just eat the meat/animal product?”

For many affected by an eating disorder, eating a vegan/vegetarian diet has more of an emotional weight to it than a “casual dieter” choosing not to eat cake. Identifying as a vegan or as a vegetarian means that food choices influence sense of self and personal identity. It is not a choice to make; it is a part of someone.

Because of this link with identity, challenge foods may seem even scarier if they threaten a person’s sense of who they are and what they believe in. For many affected by an eating disorder, veganism/vegetarianism can be about far more than wanting to avoid calorie-dense foods, challenge foods, or “junk food.” 

It can be about:

• Being smaller: Not just physically smaller, but striving to have as little impact on the earth/animals as possible.
• Reinforcing moral worth: Reaffirming sense of moral superiority or righteousness by identifying as a vegan/vegetarian.
• High standards of purity/perfectionism: Identifying as a vegan/vegetarian can be a way to chase after a narrow definition of “purity.” This can also placate the eating disorder’s desire for perfectionism.
• Black and white thinking: The eating disorder can “hijack” very real moral beliefs (compassion for animals, environmentalism, etc.) and subsequently view these beliefs through an “all or nothing” or “black and white” lens. (For example, it may not seem “good enough” to skip meat at one meal; food choices would have to be all vegan all the time. Realistically, small steps can make a difference in the health of our planet — black and white thinking only serves to highlight how the eating disorder can be stronger than one’s personal desire to make an impact in a practical, sustainable way.
• Normalizing restriction: Using veganism/vegetarianism as a way to easily avoid challenge foods or “junk” foods.
• The Safety Blanket: Having a label to give the way one eats can make eating feel safe. For example, eating dairy-based ice cream could be viewed as scary, but vegan ice cream may be doable. While this could seem harmless on the surface, it can also mask situations where restriction is still happening.
• “How can I/we honor a patient’s moral beliefs while supporting their recovery?”

One of the key ways you can support your loved one is by honoring their activism while simultaneously trying to remove the focus on “food as activism.” Activism doesn’t just have to be “on the plate,” after all. Together, you can engage in animal welfare/environmental activism that is unrelated to food. For example, you could volunteer at an animal shelter or pick up litter in a park.

You can also reaffirm that moral beliefs are dual in nature. Remind your loved one that to be kind to animals and the earth, we first have to practice being kind to ourselves. Sometimes, especially in recovery, that may mean choosing to eat meat or meat products.

Also reaffirm that sustainability is the key to effective activism. If veganism/vegetarianism can’t be done in a healthy way (mentally or physically), it won’t be sustainable in the long term. What’s most effective, both for us and our planet, is what we can healthfully practice over the course of our lifetime.

Small actions over a long period of time are hugely important. There’s an aphorism attributed to Voltaire that states that “perfect is the enemy of good,” and this is clearly demonstrated here.

What Does Love Have To Do With It?

Compassion for animals and the earth is, at its root, about love. Ultimately, an eating disorder

can hijack this love and transform it into fear, which is not the spirit of veganism or vegetarianism. Remind your loved one that when we become afraid of food, we are no longer present in love.

Beliefs are important, but so is health, and so is recovery.