Orthorexia Nervosa: the new eating disorder

paperpudding

I just wanted to get your opinion on this. Since all this 'fitspo' stuff started on instagram I couldn't help but think it was actually unhealthy. Some of the pictures/comments are promoting eating NOTHING but whole/healthy foods and exercising excessively.
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I was thinking to myself this is an eating disorder... yeah it isn't anorexia or bulimia but it's an obsession that rules peoples lives, i was reading one blog where the writer was SO fitness obsessed she would turn down drinks with her friends/meals, even though she had her 'perfect body'.
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I completely agree that this is a from of eating disorder....but when it BECOMES your life even after you've reached your goal weight and you can't enjoy the little things in life then what's the point?

Would love to know your opinions

There are so many other things that people can become obsessed and antisocial about that are truly unhealthy for them and those around them.

IMO - I am not bothered by people striving to be fit and healthy for as long as they can be. A healthy and physically capable epidemic is preferable to an obesity one. It could be worse.

You have entirely missed the point.

This disorder is NOT about people striving to be as fit and healthy as they can, in a sensible controlled way.

It is about people whose striving has veered into obsessive behaviour, affecting their social life and their mental health.

Your comment is like saying an anorexia epidemic is preferable to an obesity epidemic - No, both are unhealthy and neither is preferable.

QuietBloom

Interesting thread. I have never heard of this disorder before now and have quickly googled it. I actually thought it was that disorder where people excersise too much lol. Quite a lot of info out there and from what I have read only briefly is not so much about bringing a scale into restaurants, or refusing a piece of cake or not having a cheat day, but is more a psychological condition where people are afraid to eat food they haven't prepared themselves or don't have control of what's in it.

"Orthorexia is a term coined by Steven Bratman, MD to describe his own experience with food and eating. It is not an officially recognized disorder, but is similar to other eating disorders – those with anorexia nervosa or bulimia nervosa obsess about calories and weight while orthorexics obsess about healthy eating (not about being “thin” and losing weight)"

Some questions posed on one of the sites I visited...
•Do you wish that occasionally you could just eat and not worry about food quality?
•Do you ever wish you could spend less time on food and more time living and loving?
•Does it seem beyond your ability to eat a meal prepared with love by someone else – one single meal – and not try to control what is served?
•Are you constantly looking for ways foods are unhealthy for you?
•Do love, joy, play and creativity take a back seat to following the perfect diet?
•Do you feel guilt or self-loathing when you stray from your diet?
•Do you feel in control when you stick to the “correct” diet?
•Have you put yourself on a nutritional pedestal and wonder how others can possibly eat the foods they eat?

http://www.nationaleatingdisorders.org/orthorexia-nervosa
http://www.susieburrell.com.au/10-signs-healthy-eating-may-have-gone-too-far/
http://www.quotev.com/quiz/200413/Orthorexia-Self-Test/

Not naming names, but....

shortt123

Orthorexia was talked about a number of years ago now. I see it daily, at schools amongst young girls & when I go to the gym myself. This problem hasn't gotten any better.

I once had a very serious eating disorder, combination of orthorexia & anorexia, that almost took my life & I was in the hospital for quite some time.

Of course I have a much healthier life balance now, however I'm also trying, for real this time (lol), to lose the unhealthy weight that I gained. I say unhealthy bc it was from eating unhealthy, totally uncharacteristic of me. I fell off the healthy wagon @ 31. I was training for a triathlon before I 'pigged out', & ohhhh what a mistake!

Live & learn. Now though it breaks my heart when I hear young girls talking about wanting to lose weight to be like her or to be prettier, or hear them discuss what time they are going to the gym. Seriously?! We never went to the gym @ 13 yrs old! I had a chat w a few last week on yard duty.

Iwishyouwell

It amazes me that this country has collectively gotten so fat, in mind and body, that an "eating disorder" is now thrown on people who refuse to eat chocolate everyday at lunch, go out for alcohol, or not eat take out.

None of the above are necessary for anybody's lives. Billions of people on planet earth don't share the dietary habits that are the norm in the US. Lots of various religious and cultural sets have strict dietary guidelines.

The pressure in the country to eat every single thing available is insane and disgusting.

Ice cream is my favorite food, I can eat it until I burst. But if somebody comes along and tells me they have restricted it out of their diet, I respect that. Ice cream is not an entitlement, a necessity, or a right of passage.

If someone is a vegan, an extremely restrictive lifestyle, that's perfectly OK as long as they are healthy and happy.

If someone chooses to cut any and all desserts out of their life, good for them if they are, again, healthy and happy. Whole societies exist that almost never eat desserts.

Time and again threads like this just remind me that a ton of MFPers, regardless of what shape they're in, are food addicts who can't fathom that other people are willing, and able, to stay away from their goodie trove.

mbennett024

I would say anytime you have to embarass your kid to refuse a piece of birthday cake that you are medicaly cleared to consume or have a food scale with you at a restaurant...you might have orthorexia nervosa.

If you've ever trimmed the fat on a boneless chicken breast...you might have orthorexia nervosa.

If you'll eat a cake from whole foods but won't eat a salad at mcdonalds...you might have orthorexia nervosa.

I trim fat off of chicken because it's DISGUSTING and that's where most bad things end up...I definitley do not have an eating disorder haha that's a funny thought.

paperpudding

It amazes me that this country has collectively gotten so fat, in mind and body, that an "eating disorder" is now thrown on people who refuse to eat chocolate everyday at lunch, go out for alcohol, or not eat take out.

None of the above are necessary for anybody's lives. Billions of people on planet earth don't share the dietary habits that are the norm in the US. Lots of various religious and cultural sets have strict dietary guidelines.

That's not what this disorder is about.

maybe you should read more carefully.

Ely82010

It amazes me that this country has collectively gotten so fat, in mind and body, that an "eating disorder" is now thrown on people who refuse to eat chocolate everyday at lunch, go out for alcohol, or not eat take out.

None of the above are necessary for anybody's lives. Billions of people on planet earth don't share the dietary habits that are the norm in the US. Lots of various religious and cultural sets have strict dietary guidelines.

The pressure in the country to eat every single thing available is insane and disgusting.

Ice cream is my favorite food, I can eat it until I burst. But if somebody comes along and tells me they have restricted it out of their diet, I respect that. Ice cream is not an entitlement, a necessity, or a right of passage.

If someone is a vegan, an extremely restrictive lifestyle, that's perfectly OK as long as they are healthy and happy.

If someone chooses to cut any and all desserts out of their life, good for them if they are, again, healthy and happy. Whole societies exist that almost never eat desserts.

Time and again threads like this just remind me that a ton of MFPers, regardless of what shape they're in, are food addicts who can't fathom that other people are willing, and able, to stay away from their goodie trove.

I like what you wrote (except the ice cream part), especially the last paragraph. Well done!

krawhitham

It's definitely an eating disorder. Any "diet" that severely restricts anything 100% is encouraging disordered eating. Simply eating what you usually eat but in smaller portions is simply encouraging healthy living.

For example, I got a huge burrito today, I cut it in half and put half in the fridge for later. I only ate half of the burrito for lunch and it was more than enough.

That's healthy eating, whereas when I was gaining weight I would just down the whole burrito without even thinking about how I was over eating and THAT is also disordered eating (over eating)

I never learned normal eating as a child because my mother has had disordered eating her whole life. The last time I talked to her on the phone I told her I lost 10 lbs, and she said "oh that's great, I lost a bunch of weight when you were a kid because I stopped eating fat and sugar completely and I was so skinny!" she also told me "when I was pregnant with you I was full vegetarian and lived on rice and beans!" WTF. WHY. This woman *loves* pizza and ice cream, yet she can't just have one bite, she doesn't believe she can just have two slices and stop.

I only shook my head without saying anything on the other end of the phone, because that was when she was in her 40s. She's now pushing 65 and she wants to lose 20 lbs, but spends 3 hours in the gym and then overeats every meal because she "just cant" cut out sugar and fats anymore, it's "too hard." Of course it is, you're supposed to eat fat. Your body needs sugar!

Yet, she truly believes within her mind that she is unable to eat a normal amount of food in one sitting. I hope I teach myself how to just eat normal portions so I don't have disordered eating for the rest of my life like she does.

Barbellgirl

What's the name of the disorder where someone has to label all groups of people? :drinker:

tennisdude2004

What's the name of the disorder where someone has to label all groups of people? :drinker:

MFP

OMGSugarOHNOS

What if I don't want to eat cake because it's garbage and I'd rather not eat it. Cake's not healthy and I'd most often rather eat nothing than eat cake - even if I was hungry. Does this mean I have a disorder?

Yes, thinking cake is unhealthy is disordered thinking.

thinfitfabulous

I can say with confidence that it really is an eating disorder because I have suffered from it in the past. I think it may stem from too much of an "all or nothing" attitude or those who tend to be perfectionists.
Type A, here lol.

sinkingthinking

Wow - an eating disorder where eating healthy food is bad.

Part of the problem is the belief that there is such a thing as a healthy food.

And then people continue this mindset by placing other foods in an "unhealthy" category. As if health is a scalar quantity, and eating one type of food increases this number and eating 'bad' foods decreases it. And then they seek to become 'healthy' by avoiding all of the foods they've categorized as 'unhealthy.' As if these foods actively destroy your body.

No food is healthy in a vacuum.

It's about context.

If you eat nothing but broccoli, you will die of malnutrition. Broccoli is no better than cake. The difference is that very few people actually WANT to eat nothing but broccoli. So it's easy to blame overeating of cake and correlate it with being unhealthy, and mistakenly conclude that cake actively destroys your health.

But someone who includes reasonable amounts of both broccoli and cake in their regular intake will be just as healthy as they would if they had only included one or the other.

If you think eating cake regularly will not make you less healthy than you would be if you never ate any sugary junk food at all, you haven't read many studies about the effects of sugar. The age-promoting effects and BDNF-lowering effects (and both ageing and lowered BDNF increase the speed of neurogeneration and dementia onset) are bad even if you maintain excellent blood sugar regulation. That's the difference between brocolli and sugar. Eating brocolli as part of your regular diet has no known negative consequences at all. Eating cake as part of your regular diet *does* have negative consequences and you'd be healthier without it.

However, what someone with orthorexia loses sight of (speaking from experience - I probably have had this to some clinically significant degree in the past) is that this does *not* mean that everybody would be happier if they never ate cake even occasionally, because the small health damage we're talking about from somewhat regular (say, no more than once a week) sugary treat consumption might be outweighed by the pleasure that treat gives you - it depends on the person and their particular health and how much pleasure they actually get from it.

People with orthorexia usually become very judgmental of people who don't make the same sacrifices for their health, because health becomes completely associated with psychological well-being to the point where you can't appreciate that for *most* people (excluding those who truly don't like or crave junk food enough to make it worthwhile and those with mental or chronic fatigue illnesses that are made worse by less than optimal nutrition), ageing your body a bit faster than necessary with *occasional* sugar (not eating so much of it as many people do that you develop unpleasant conditions considerable years sooner than you otherwise would) is preferable in terms of quality of life to keeping youthful and healthy for longer but losing out on social and gustatory pleasures.

In addition, as others have said, for it to be a disorder, the sacrifices made or doubts about whether you can really trust even the foods you've decided to live on, have to be clinically impairing or distressing. If you're so afraid of accidentally consuming something unhealthy that you consistently under-eat (e.g. "if no one can guarantee that the available fruit and veg haven't been washed with chlorine/fluoride water, I won't eat anything"), you're through the looking glass, but that's not the only way it can become a problem.

sinkingthinking

Orthorexia Nervosa, AKA Strict Paleo

No, AKA veganism.

Oh, there are plenty of orthorexic followers of paleo and other low-carb and zero-carb diets. There are a few blog posts about the issue from adherents themselves. An orthorexic person will seek out the most ideal diet they can think of and sacrifice everything to stick to it, and it could be absolutely anything that they happen to decide is the healthiest diet. Some low-carb advocates tell people never to eat fruit (not a problem in itself) AND rarely eat vegetables, and not just temporarily as Atkins did, but long-term. If an orthorexic person really believed that, tried it and got scurvy but remained frightened of vegetables, they'd be very un-vegan and very orthorexic.

The English-speaking media simply focus on the supposedly "vegan" orthorexics (many or most of these people are not actually vegans as they only eschew EATING animal products, and by definition a vegan boycotts animal products for ANY purpose), probably because low-carb diets are not seen as quite so strange or difficult to live by in cultures where animal products dominate the mainstream diet so much. The media will always seek out examples to showcase that they think the audience will be the most shocked by, and in our cultures, someone being obsessed with following a particular version of a diet that happens to be low-carb just isn't as shocking as someone obsessed with a particular version of a diet that happens to be plant-based, now that so many people have at least briefly tried a low-carb diet for themselves.

The media also focus on those rare orthorexics who lose too much weight, again for shock-value, and those ones tend to be raw-food "vegans". Most vegans and diet-only "vegans" alike (let's combine them into a category called "plant-based diets" for clarity), are not raw foodists, and as far as I know most raw foodists don't become underweight, but when combined with orthorexia, it's probably easier to lose a lot of weight on a raw plant-based diet than on most other diets, because raw foodists can't eat certain high-calorie foods that are available and common in most plant-based diets. So that's another reason this has rather infuratingly been dubbed "the vegan disorder" by at least one writer: conflation of "veganism" with the much less common raw-food group of diets.

Personally, when I was actually orthorexic, I was NOT on a plant-based diet; I ate some animal products although I had already been vegetarian (and not for health reasons) for years. Now I'm NOT orthorexic (although I still have wobbles and related symptoms, e.g. anxiety, hateful thoughts and inconvenient avoidance strategies when I find myself breathing other people's else's cigarette smoke), but I AM vegan. Orthorexia is not about which particular diet you choose, especially if that diet isn't even motivated by health. It's about whether you're pathologically anxious or impaired by disproportionate efforts to be healthy, or continue to follow a diet in the same way even when it's causing obvious medical problems.