Are You A Healthy Eater – Or Could You Have Orthorexia?

If you’re on a diet, you’ll obviously be adjusting your eating habits to make sure your food intake is healthier than it used to be. You might have ditched the cookies that you normally eat with your mid-morning coffee ; you may have found an alternative to your previous Friday night pizza; and you’ll probably be making various tweaks and changes in order to cut calories without feeling like you’re missing out too much.

You’re also hopefully eating your five a day, keeping an eye on your fat intake (saturated fat in particular), and having plenty of fiber and wholegrains.

All of this is great … but for some dieters, it can go too far. What starts off as a desire to eat healthily can become an obsession with eating “pure” foods or the “right” things only. This was dubbed “orthorexia” by the Colorado doctor Steven Bratman, in 1997. “Orthorexia” has been described as a “maniacal obsession for healthy foods”.

Symptoms of Orthorexia

Orthorexic people take healthy eating to extremes. Typical behavior includes:

Cutting out whole food groups (eg. dairy) without any medical reason
Having numerous restrictions on what foods are “allowed”
Focusing on the nutritional makeup of food – rather than enjoying food for its own sake
Feeling very worried or anxious about what you eat
Having strong negative feelings about foods: deeming certain foods “dangerous” or “forbidden”
Refusing to eat something without first calculating its “healthiness” – eg. whether it’s organic, free of artificial colors and flavors, etc
Extremely restrictive diets, eg. only eating raw food
Feeling virtuous, pure and in control when eating the “right” foods
Being competitive about eating healthily, and criticizing other people’s diets

Steven Bratman wrote about orthorexia and extreme healthy eating after experiencing this himself:

I regarded the wretched, debauched souls about me downing their chocolate chip cookies and french fries as mere animals reduced to satisfying gustatory lusts. But I wasn’t complacent in my virtue. Feeling an obligation to enlighten my weaker brethren, I continually lectured friends and family on the evils of refined, processed food and the dangers of pesticides and artificial fertilizers.

Orthorexia is not yet an officially recognized medical condition, though some doctors may diagnose it.

Dangers of Orthorexia

In extreme cases, orthorexia can lead to death: Kate Finn died in 2003 (you can read about her life and the incorrect diagnosis of anorexia here).

Sufferers may be malnourished or lack energy, if they are consuming insufficient amounts of food.

Like other eating disorders, orthorexia is socially isolating. If you take healthy eating too far, you may feel unable to bear eating your mother’s home cooking, or you may avoid accepting dinner invitations because you’re worried that there’ll only be “unhealthy” dishes available.

Some experts believe that orthorexia shares the same roots as obsessive-compulsive disorder.

Orthorexics are often a normal weight – this can make the disorder hard to recognize (especially as it has yet to become an official medical diagnosis).

Differences Between Orthorexia and Anorexia

Although orthorexia and anorexia share some of the same characteristics, symptoms and dangers, they are distinct disorders.

Anorexics seek to severely limit the amount of food (and, generally, specifically the number of calories) that they consume. Their aim is to be as thin as possible. They may eat foods that orthorexics would consider “unhealthy” – such as artificial sweeteners – in order to keep their calorie intake low.

Orthorexics may not count calories. Instead, they focus on the health benefits of foods – often reacting to food scares, or new “superfoods”, in the media. Orthorexics are not primarily concerned with being thin, but with eating a “pure”, “natural” or “virtuous” diet.

Where would you draw the line between a healthy focus on eating well – and an unhealthy obsession? If you think you might have orthorexia, you can find out more about the disorder on Dr Steve Bratman’s website at http://www.orthorexia.com.

Written by Ali Hale

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