The modern cult of a healthy lifestyle and its most important component, proper nutrition, can bring negative results. Recently, scientists have started talking about a new eating disorder – orthorexia nervosa, or an obsessive desire to eat right.
Being picky about food and avoiding unhealthy foods is great. Refuse fast food, replace the carbohydrate side dish with vegetable salad, and animal fats for vegetable oils – many of us try to live by these rules and succeed. However, some go further, turning a healthy habit into an obsession.
“A person can have an unhealthy fixation on something that is inherently healthy,” writes Dr. Steven Bratman, who coined the concept of orthorexia. “Think about exercise addiction or workaholism.”
The line between a healthy habit and an obsession is blurred, and a person rarely notices that he has crossed this line, but for those around him, the difference is more obvious. You may have observed such people in your environment: they are in a state of constant anxiety about what they have eaten, are eating or intend to eat. Orthorexics’ thoughts revolve around food, and more importantly, their whole life revolves around it.
Such people spend their free time looking for healthy organic food, preparing it properly and planning the next lunches and dinners. They refuse invitations to visit – they will serve the wrong food. They cannot eat in most restaurants because they are not sure that the food is prepared according to strict health codes. They cannot travel. By focusing on a healthy diet and only on it, they greatly impoverish their lives.
What food is considered healthy?
Orthorexia is not recognized as a disease: there is no evidence yet that such eating behavior is unhealthy. However, the number of people who have an unhealthy fixation on a healthy diet is estimated by researchers.1 in 6,9% of the total number of those examined, and it is likely that their number is growing. “I definitely see more orthorexics than a few years ago,” says Ursula Philpot, a member of the British Dietetic Association. – If, with other eating disorders, people limit themselves in the amount of food consumed, then orthorexics can have a normal or even increased weight. They are solely concerned with the quality of the food they eat and are constantly introducing new restrictions into the diet, guided by their idea of what food is really healthy.
Here lies the danger: if the disorder progresses, a person can so thoroughly impoverish his diet that he will no longer receive the necessary nutrients with food. The problem is exacerbated by articles in magazines and the Internet, posts on forums that describe the various horrors that await consumers of packaged juices or cocoa. If a person has not developed a critical attitude to information, such emotional cries can become a reason to exclude product after product from the diet until, for example, only poached farm cabbage remains.
Some Research2 do show that orthorexics have a lower level of education on average compared to people who just try to eat right, which means that their ideas about healthy food can be somewhat chaotic.
Voluntary isolation orthorexic
Level of education is only part of the problem, which, like most cases of eating disorders, goes much deeper. “When considering issues of problematic eating, it is very important to consider that the symptoms refer us not so much to the problem of food consumption, but to the problem of the relationship of a person with the world. They indicate a person’s ability to accept something from the world or total distrust, a desire to keep their world in isolation. Refusal to eat means refusal to accept something in the world,” says psychoanalytic therapist Anatoly Dobin.
An orthorexic defines himself through what he eats, and more than that, he defines other people in this way. To those who, in his opinion, eat incorrectly, a person with such a fixation treats with ill-concealed arrogance and tries to distance himself from “unworthy society.” Since the requirements can be very strict: brown rice without salt, steamed broccoli, triple-filtered water – almost the entire society is unworthy. Man dooms himself to isolation in a cocoon of false complacency. No one will ever be able to offend him, reject him: he himself rejected everything that could harm him, and everyone who could hurt him by refusing recognition.
How to solve a problem
That is why working with patients suffering from orthorexia nervosa is so difficult – they, like anorexics, refuse to acknowledge the problem. “Fighting with a patient about changing his eating behavior is pointless,” says Anatoly Dobin. “Often such behavior is his only way to declare a living child inside himself, in need of care, acceptance and autonomy. Much more useful is the expression of understanding of the pain and suffering that takes on this form of expression and sometimes brings it to the brink of life and death. In addition, the desire to “take away” what is felt to be the “main” achievement and manifestation of autonomy cannot but cause negative feelings and opposition.”
Fortunately, acknowledging the problem practically solves it. Stephen Bratman, who went through a period of fixation on healthy food before becoming a researcher of this phenomenon, was helped by common sense: he once realized that the guidelines for proper nutrition contradict each other: sweets are not allowed, but honey is healthy; eggs are a great source of protein, any animal protein is poison, and so on. The realization that he was following a controversial philosophy set Dr. Bratman on the road to recovery.
The prospects, if you can solve the emotional problems associated with eating disorders, are very bright. “The recovered orthorexic will still eat healthy,” writes nutrition specialist Karin Kratina (Nutrition Therapy Associates, Florida), “but will begin to understand the essence of healthy eating differently. He will understand that food will not make him better than he is, and that building his self-esteem on the quality of the diet is irrational. He will stop describing himself as “a person who eats healthy food” and expand the scope of definitions – a person who loves, works, has fun. He will realize that while food is important, it is just a tiny aspect of his life and that there are more important things in the world.”
1 A. Tulay Bagcı Bosi et al. «Prevalence of orthorexia nervosa in resident medical doctors in the faculty of medicine»
2 L.Donini et al. «Orthorexia nervosa: a preliminary study with a proposal for diagnosis and an attempt to measure the dimension of the phenomenon». Eat Weight Disord, 2004 9 (2): 151–157