Healthy Eating Taken Too Far
Eating healthy is, well, good for your health.
But for some people, trying to stick to a healthy diet becomes an obsession with only eating foods that they believe to be healthy.
Known as orthorexia nervosa, this condition seems to be on the rise in recent years, fueled in part by the popularity of restrictive fad diets like Paleo, gluten-free, vegan and raw.
“With all of the media attention around different health foods, different marketing of health foods, and social media, it seems to be getting more common,” says Natalie Wingfield, a counselor at Virginia Beach Counseling and Wellness, LLC, in Virginia Beach.
Orthorexia is not currently recognized as a clinical diagnosis. Some psychologists, though, are calling for its formal recognition, while those suffering from this condition struggle to find the help they need.
One challenge of orthorexia is that people are focused on eating healthy,
so it may not appear as a problem
right away.
“It’s really hard to tease out what’s going on,” says Wingfield. People with orthorexia “certainly aren’t realizing that it is a problem. Even with other people in their life, it might take longer to see that this has kind of crossed the line.”
Following a healthy diet does not mean that you have orthorexia. When done in a balanced way, eliminating gluten or meat from your diet, or eating only raw foods,
can be healthy.
But for some people, these restrictions are a slippery slope. They may start out by eliminating gluten from their diet, and then meat. After that, they may become vegan, and then raw.
As people cut out more and more foods from their diet, they can develop deficiencies of certain nutrients.
Focusing too much on eating healthy can also take a psychological toll.
“There’s nothing wrong with eating healthy,” says Wingfield. “It’s just when it becomes an obsession and takes over their whole life that it becomes a problem.”
As orthorexics spend more of their time and energy planning what to eat and avoiding “unhealthy” foods at restaurants, they may become socially isolated.
They can also forget how to eat intuitively—knowing when they are hungry and full. And as with other eating disorders, people with orthorexia can feel guilty when they deviate from their diet.
Even though orthorexia is not recognized officially, mental health professionals can still help people with this condition.
During therapy, orthorexics explore their thoughts around food as they move toward being less rigid about food choices. But they may also need to work through underlying emotional issues, especially those that may have triggered the obsession.
“One of the big features of orthorexia is making your food choices based on fear,” says Wingfield, “as opposed to appropriate preferences that are flexible.”
Learning how to eat a balanced diet can also help people with their recovery.
“If they become underweight, then restoring their weight needs to be the main focus,” says Wingfield, “because it’s very difficult to do any kind of work around thoughts when you’re malnourished.”
Not everyone who goes on a fad diet will develop “an unhealthy obsession with otherwise healthy eating,” as the National Eating Disorders Association calls orthorexia.
“Even though there are triggers—things like the media or body image, or weight concerns,” says Wingfield, “we know that those alone don’t cause eating disorders.”
Recent research suggests that underlying biologic or genetic factors may contribute to eating disorders. This alone can help people with orthorexia to move beyond their condition.
“Maybe going on the diet kind of flipped the switch on orthorexia,” says Wingfield, “but it’s something that was beyond your control, and it’s a real biological illness.”
