¿Why the #MeandMyEating Campaign?
Just a century ago, most of the population suffered from food shortages that were the source of various medical problems related to malnutrition. Today, in the Western world, we suffer the consequences of the opposite effect; the abundance of food. Overweight and obese, obsession with fit bodies, lack of a healthy relationship with food, eating disorders such as anorexia, bulimia and binge eating, mental disorders such as bigorexia and orthorexia, as well as associated social tendencies such as fatphobia and fat-shaming related to misinformation and stereotypes, are just a few.
As a society, we are quite lost when it comes to managing the abundance of food and not falling into some patterns or trends that are not very healthy and can harm us in the long term.
What is the scale of the problem? Let's look at the statistics:
2.550 million adults in the world are overweight or obese (1). In Spain, more than half of the population is overweight (2), while 81% of people who diet to try to lose weight, fail. We find that only 24% of Spanish people agree with their kilos (3) and studies seem to confirm that dieting actually makes us gain weight (4).
In addition to this, around 400,000 people in Spain suffer from an eating disorder (ED) (5), affecting 9% of the world’s population and being among the most deadly mental illnesses, only surpassed by an overdose of opioids (6). About 10,200 deaths are counted each year, being the direct result of an eating disorder, that is, one death every 52 minutes (7). All this translates into an annual economic expenditure of $ 64.7 billion in the case of ED in general (7) which is added to the economic impact of obesity, which is $ 1.4 billion per year (8).
¿What is the #MeandMyEating Campaign?
At the ART Project and with the support of our collaborators (the therapists, internship students of the ART Clinic and the restaurants and bars of Barcelona that joined the campaign) we are working on a campaign that aims to promote healthy habits and attitudes related to eating tendencies and the body such as:
- Promote a healthy relationship with food and the body
- Increase connection with and awareness of the body
- Learn to eat more intuitively
- Learn the principles of Mindful Eating
- Know how to take care of yourself and make choices
- Increase knowledge related to food
- Fight against stereotypes and taboos
- Not to promote weight loss diets
- Increase awareness related to eating disorders
- Fight against fat phobia and fat shaming
- Promote the idea that each person has the right not to be judged by their body
- Increase self-acceptance
