Orthorexia: Real or Justification for an Unhealthy Society?

One day, while vigorously avoiding doing any work at work, I ran across a blog post about the exciting new eating disorder, orthorexia.

It’s great to eat healthy food, and most of us could benefit by paying a little more attention to what we eat. However, some people have the opposite problem: they take the concept of healthy eating to such an extreme that it becomes an obsession. I call this state of mind orthorexia nervosa: literally, “fixation on righteous eating.”

Such people are sometimes affectionately called “healthfood junkies.” However, in some cases, orthorexia goes beyond a mere lifestyle choice. Obsession with healthy food can progress to the point where it crowds out other activities and interests, impairs relationships, and even becomes physically dangerous. When this happens, orthorexia takes on the dimensions of a true eating disorder, like anorexia nervosa or bulimia.

Do you wish that occasionally you could just eat, and not think about whether it’s good for you? Has your diet made you socially isolated? Is it impossible to imagine going through a whole day without paying attention to your diet, and just living and loving? Does it sound beyond your ability to eat a meal prepared with love by your mother – one single meal – and not try to control what she serves you? Do you have trouble remembering that love, and joy, and play and creativity are more important than food? Have you gotten your weight so low that people think you may have anorexia?

This definition by Dr. Steven Bratman really isn’t so bad. In fact, I do know people who’ve fallen head first into a dark pit of food faddisms of various sorts and suffered horribly as a result. One, a “recovered” alcoholic and respected massage therapist, essentially flatlined her digestive system at one point, leading to chronic gas and diarrhea (not exactly conducive to business). Before that, she’d spent a year following a macrobiotic foodist in San Francisco and did, in fact, waste away to almost nothing before her naturopath finally slapped some since sense into her.

And there have been others. So, in fact, I do believe there are some people out there who take their obsession with the purity of food to such extremes that they endanger their health and well-being.

However — and it’s a big however — we’re a grossly overweight and unhealthy society with strongly developed cultural tendencies to celebrate the extremes, to think only in terms of black and white (nuance is for sissies, after all), to bully our opponents into submission and ourselves into premature diabetes and heart disease, to want what we want when we want it how we want it, fuckers.

More important, we’re a society governed by corporations and agribusiness where we delude ourselves into believe in our individual rights and freedoms while the multinationals quietly strip us of our health and land and money, slipping us all manner of medical and psychiatric diagnoses with targeted pharmaceutical relief as recompense.

And maybe most important of all: the concept of orthorexia, although interesting and seeming to have some small basis in reality as a variant of anorexia, is already being abused:

Melanie Freetly of Logan Square said she notices the glances from strangers when she passes up the buffet or the meat and cheese platters at parties, choosing instead to eat nothing.

Freetly said her food pickiness, combined with her small frame, sometimes leads people to think she has an eating disorder.

“I’ve never been that person, but I’ve often been mistaken for that person,” Freetly, 24, said. “A lot of people don’t understand the difference between being vegan and having an eating disorder.”

… and …

Are you spending more than three hours a day thinking about healthy food?
Are you planning tomorrow’s menu today?
Is the virtue you feel about what you eat more important than the pleasure you receive from eating it?
Has the quality of your life decreased as the quality of your diet increased?
Have you become stricter with yourself?
Does your self-esteem get a boost from eating healthy? Do you look down on others who don’t eat this way?
Do you skip foods you once enjoyed in order to eat the “right” foods?
Does your diet make it difficult for you to eat anywhere but at home, distancing you from friends and family.
Do you feel guilt or self-loathing when you stray from your diet?
When you eat the way you’re supposed to, do you feel in total control?

If you answered yes to two or three of these questions, you may have a mild case of orthorexia. Four or more means that you need to relax more when it comes to food. If all these items apply to you, you have become obsessed with food. So where do you go from there?

By those terms, I’m orthorexic.

But, I also suffer no migraines. And, having spent half of my childhood debilitated by classic migraines because of undiagnosed celiac disease, I’m perfectly happy with my obsessive avoidance of wheat products, especially given avoiding them has resulted in a migraine-free adulthood.

Note that the link above goes to an article about the “newly discovered” relationships between migraine and celiac disease. I could have told them that years ago.

I also no longer have to take medical treatments for anemia, as celiac disease flatlines the digestive system, leading to malnutrition. I spent my childhood ingesting all kinds of substances from the doctors in their attempts to resolve that problem.

I also have wonderfully stunningly good blood glucose levels, thanks to my obsessive avoidance of high fructose corn syrup, desserts at every turn, processed foods loaded with sugars, and highly refined carbs.

Given I’m a lifelong hypoglycemic (meaning I likely have some inborn error of sugar metabolism which makes me even more predisposed to diabetes) with first degree relatives who are diabetic and a long family history of diabetes and definitely the diabetic body type (I have yet to discover a waist on my body), I’d say I’m doing pretty good.

According to the criteria, however, I have an eating disorder.

Change the wording a bit, and so does AAF, what with his obsession with good food and his near constant posting about it.

As a society, we’re desperately unhealthy, but we’re also way overmedicalized. All this new-fangled eating disorder does is feed into our unhealthiness and overmedicalization, while giving cover to the corporations taking more and more control of our eating choices.

Besides, there really is such a thing as anorexia, and this trivializes it.

The goal should be for each of us to empower ourselves and take at least some control of our health back. If a person is fortunate enough to be able to do that through food choices, more power to them. Besides, it’s yet one more way to stick it to agribusiness.

Back to packing and watching breaking tornado coverage …