Symptoms of orthorexia
It is not easy to recognize an orthorexic person although the unhealthy desire to eat a healthy diet is at the heart of its concerns.
The signs of orthorexia are similar to:
- Follow binding dietary rules to minimize your intake of salt, sugar and fat;
- Classify foods by categories: “good / healthy” or “bad / unhealthy”;
- Be obsessed with the qualitative aspect food. An orthorexic person may even go so far as to foresee relief meal if she does not eat at home;
- To regard food as a medicine to the detriment of taste or pleasure. Oily or sweet dishes are considered poison;
- Spend several hours a day thinking about how to optimize your diet;
- Abuse of food supplements;
- Decipher food labels looking especially at additives, preservatives and colorants. Logically, an orthorexic person relies on foods of organic origin without pesticides;
- View this obsession become quasi spiritual. A person suffering from orthorexia thinks to preserve his health and his bodily purity by feeding ideally;
- Do a lot of research to find the ideal diet;
- Forcing oneself to real ritual : chew food at least 50 times before swallowing them, do not eat vegetables picked for more than a few hours, steam the beans for 12 minutes precisely in order to keep their nutritional value;
- Hold moralistic and rigid rhetoric about healthy eating.