As a recovering perfectionist with a history of orthorexic eating and an obsessive approach to exercise in my 20s, I can relate to most of this.
“Often people think about it as just having high standards,” Anna Bardone-Cone, professor in the psychology and neuroscience department at the University of North Carolina, Chapel Hill, says.
“Perfectionism is more complex than that.”
It involves “evaluating yourself all the time” and feeling strongly that “others have very high expectations for you; that others expect [you] to be perfect”.
And eating disorders are strongly associated with it.”
Here’s the full article. It’s worth a read for us parents, too.
-J