Fitness professional knows first-hand the perils of overzealous focus on healthy eating

Social media and unqualified personal trainers can promote unhealthy eating habits, the fitness professional said.

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DUBAI // A female fitness professional knows first-hand how an overzealous focus on healthy eating can become as detrimental and dangerous as an eating disorder.

The trainer, who wished to remain anonymous, suffered a damaged metabolism and disrupted thyroid function after becoming vegan and consuming many of her daily calories in the form of smoothies.

“Social media is the worst influence in all this,” she said. “Personal trainers can be certified for personal training yet they’re dishing out advice on nutrition for which they have no qualification. There are also a lot of people with zero qualifications out there, just ‘certified by selfie’.

“People nowadays are more interested in nutrition and it’s all about fad diets which you can see in the best-selling books which are all about eating gluten free or low carb diets.”

Though the woman enjoyed being vegan, she admits that she was “thinking about food so much that it wasn’t healthy”.

“I was asking where is this from, what’s it doing to my body... I realised I was under weight and had suppressed thyroid function which comes from restricting some foods. I was freezing for years and had mood swings, which I thought was a part of my personality, but it was a nutritional deficiency.”

She said women, especially, need to be conscious of orthorexia, which is akin to anorexia.

“I see a lot of my students on very restricted diets in their 20s which, in later life, will have done a lot of damage and ruin their metabolism.”

Neal Dinan, a sports performance coach at Scandinavian Health and Performance, said fitness professionals had a responsibility to clients.

“The problem with many of the [personal trainers] here is that they are leaving their prints on their clients,” he said. “There is no point introducing someone to a [low carb] diet or any other form of extreme when they’re not prepared for it.”

He added that trainers live a lifestyle unlike the average office-based person who cannot manage the same routines.

“They get so consumed by their own lifestyle and become oblivious to what’s going on in the real world. Things like food allergies and intolerances have to be evidence-based so you can’t just cut foods out of people’s diets without evidence of conditions such as leaky gut or thyroid dysfunction.”

mswan@thenational.ae