Orthorexia – The Unknown Health-Food Eating Disorder

I am a crunchy, organic, home gardening fiend. As I child I preferred Cheerios to Sugar Smacks. I realized at 5 years of age that Pepsi freaked me out and I didn’t like the feeling. I set my alarm an hour early when I was 7 or 8 so I could meditate before school. I plotted my turn to vegetarianism with my best friend Michelle in high school.

So, healthy eating is in my DNA.

But I was really never taught how to eat healthy.  My mom would diet on her own behalf while making us these amazing tamale pies but there was no education about healthy eating.  Same same with my health classes, and home economics classes.  So, when I found myself sick, and then heard the natural eating world tell me it was the food I had been eating, it created a strange conundrum.  I became afraid to eat foods. I think I started developing a form of an eating disorder called Orthorexia.

During a lunch date with my nutritionist friend Bari, she told me that many naturopaths, acupuncturists and nutritionists come out of their training with this eating disorder because they are being exposed to all the things that can possibly go wrong with food.  We are simultaneously inundated with “eat this food it will cure cancer” and “don’t eat this exact same food, it will cause cancer”.  How can we not? Isn’t it the right thing to avoid foods that hurt us?  Not to mention, “The Internet” is full of all sorts of information about what will heal us and hurt us.  Then of course we know a gal who has genuine issues with foods.  For instance, I have a good friend who gets migraines when she eats soy.

With all this new information, and having something that started working to unravel my illness in tangible ways, I started developing an anxiety about when or how I could eat.  I would research foods extensively to make sure that they wouldn’t inflame my colitis. I wouldn’t eat at restaurants because there was nothing for me to eat there. I did not touch or even dream about gluten, nightshades, rice or dairy for almost 6 years.  As I became more savvy would stress about contradictory information.

We can get this  anxiety about carbs, meat, sugar, gluten, oil, nightshades or anything else one could imagine.  Our naturopaths can put the fear of God in us about sugar. Mine did. I had one say that if we all just stopped drinking caffeine that all naturopaths would be put out of business. I was looking at my one latte a day and wondering if I should go off that too, guiltily showing up at my favorite coffee shop every day, talking to my favorite baristas and feeling like I was Barabbas. 

It’s understandable that we are searching for the one cure. Our desire to not be controlled by anything is a potent force.  When we are presented with data that tells us that our next step is into hell, it is natural to panic. It is also easy to slide into thinking about it over and over until it becomes this huge monster that needs to be slain. We can become fearful of our medications too, projecting our difficulties onto them and making them the enemy.

The internet seems to be full of one shot magic bullets.  It’s the click bait style and poorly researched writing that finds us struggling to discover what actually IS healthy for us.  Not to mention, so often articles are just repeating the same poor information so we think it is true because it is ALL OVER.

We really are wired towards oversimplification…  rather than deal with the complexity, we will latch on to the presented panacea.

Back when ice began to be artificially created (AKA Ice makers), there was a movement to elevate natural lake ice over that artificially frozen ice. It’s more natural! It was good enough for our grandparents! Pay no attention to the pollution in the water! Or dysentery. People latched on to this “health” idea, that was based out of fear of disease, and ran with it to a strange land. Today, we may look back and scoff with disbelief but these claims were made with a straight face and many accepted their claims out of a mix of genuine fear of an unknown danger and a desire to be healthy.

When you have a disease, fixing it can become all consuming.  We can blame all our issues on the diet we are currently or were eating, and then we can blame our symptoms on the medications that we are taking.  We find ourselves in a power struggle with our illness through our food and medications.  We are literally hoping that if we just eat or don’t eat certain foods that our health will be set back to rights.  Remember what Orthorexia is:  “an obsession with eating foods that one considers healthy.” Adopting a healthy theory about eating is not orthorexia.  Developing Anxiety around eating foods is.

Here are some symptoms from Bratman who coined the term:

The Bratman Orthorexia Self-Test*

If you are a healthy-diet enthusiast, and you answer yes to any of the following questions, you may be developing orthorexia nervosa:

(1) I spend so much of my life thinking about, choosing and preparing healthy food that it interferes with other dimensions of my life, such as love, creativity, family, friendship, work and school.

(2) When I eat any food I regard to be unhealthy, I feel anxious, guilty, impure, unclean and/or defiled; even to be near such foods disturbs me, and I feel judgmental of others who eat such foods.

(3) My personal sense of peace, happiness, joy, safety and self-esteem is excessively dependent on the purity and rightness of what I eat.

(4) Sometimes I would like to relax my self-imposed “good food” rules for a special occasion, such as a wedding or a meal with family or friends, but I find that I cannot. (Note: If you have a medical condition in which it is unsafe for you to make ANY exception to your diet, then this item does not apply.)

(5) Over time, I have steadily eliminated more foods and expanded my list of food rules in an attempt to maintain or enhance health benefits; sometimes, I may take an existing food theory and add to it with beliefs of my own.

(6) Following my theory of healthy eating has caused me to lose more weight than most people would say is good for me, or has caused other signs of malnutrition such as hair loss, loss of menstruation or skin problems.

I think the movie Apocalypto might have something for us today. I’d like you to imagine that this is your own body talking to you about your relationship with fear and food. 

Flint Sky says to his son Jaguar Paw: Those people in the forest, what did you see on them?

Jaguar Paw answers:  I do not understand.

Flint Sky answers:  “Fear. Deep rotting fear. They were infected by it. Did you see? Fear is a sickness. It will crawl into the soul of anyone who engages it. It has tainted your peace already.
I did not raise you to see you live with fear. Strike it from your heart.
Do not bring it into our village.”

My peace around food started to unwind the moment I stopped listening to all the authorities around me and started listening and taking notes with my own body.  I stopped blaming my illnesses symptoms on my medication.  I stopped trying to control the chaos I felt around having a disease through my food intake.  We will always want to have someone who knows what to do when things are beyond hard.  Disease is scary. Pain is scary.  Hospitals are excruciating crucibles that have yet to be overhauled into compassionate healing centers. 

But our struggle against our illness:  through natural remedies that tell us medication is killing us, against our doctors that tell us diet makes no difference, our Chiropractors and our naturopaths and our Chinese Physicians who all disagree wildly with each other needs to quiet down and agree to be the errand boy:  It cannot run the show.

We need to listen… but to our body not the fear.  If the doctor tells us to do something, see what your body says about it.  If the medication is making it better, then you need to care for your body and take it.  Having your stomach ripped to shreds because your very good friend told you that she heard some “health food” controlled Colitis and they heard that people were able to go off their meds, is not a good plan.  AKA natural foods are better than medication, of course.  (True story BTW)

“Here is the central point: Enthusiasm for healthy eating doesn’t become “orthorexia” until a tipping point is reached and enthusiasm transforms into obsession.

Orthorexia is an emotionally disturbed, self-punishing relationship with food that involves a progressively shrinking universe of foods deemed acceptable. A gradual constriction of many other dimensions of life occurs so that thinking about healthy food can becomes the central theme of almost every moment of the day, the sword and shield against every kind of anxiety, and the primary source of self-esteem, value and meaning. This may result in social isolation, psychological disturbance and even, possibly, physical harm.”
–  Steven Bratman, MD, MPH

The answer:  listen to your body.  Your body needs to trust you, and you need to learn how to listen and then act on its behalf. The Indian sufi teacher Hazrat Inayat Khan said:

“The body is an instrument for experiencing life; both the worlds,
that within and without, are reflected in this instrument….As the work of an astronomer depends upon a telescope, and as it is necessary for him to keep the telescope as clean as possible, so it is necessary in the life of the mystic to keep the body in a fit condition….
Mystics, therefore, take precaution about what they eat and drink.” 

Meaning:  we are thoughtful and present about the complexity around our bodies. We are not compulsive or fearful.  We research, take notes, consider what would be healthful for our bodies and then hold a level of grace both for our psyches as we struggle and if and when our body fails us.

I don’t have any magic bullet answers here about how our food can change from a healthy endeavor to controlling our lives. But I have some suggestions!   The illness can feel like it is doing it to us and we might feel a strong need to answer with a battle cry. It might feel even like a holy war.

But no matter what, what my friend Orion always tells me when I trying to figure out if I am in a pit or in a castle is that “a child is never beat into creativity.”