{"id":1186,"date":"2008-09-11T14:00:50","date_gmt":"2008-09-11T19:00:50","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/www.dietsinreview.com\/diet_column\/09\/orthorexia-when-eating-healthy-goes-too-far\/"},"modified":"2009-02-24T12:20:14","modified_gmt":"2009-02-24T17:20:14","slug":"orthorexia-when-eating-healthy-goes-too-far","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/dietsinreview.com\/diet_column\/09\/orthorexia-when-eating-healthy-goes-too-far\/","title":{"rendered":"Orthorexia: When Eating Healthy Goes Too Far"},"content":{"rendered":"

On 20\/20 this past Friday night, they featured a new kind of an obsessive compulsive disorder called “orthorexia.” Orthorexics\u00a0are individuals who take eating healthy to an extreme. They avoid eating not just a few things like trans fats or meat, but thousands of\u00a0different kinds of food all in the name of health. It is a psychological\u00a0addiction to food, but it differs from anorexics<\/a>, who\u00a0have a pathological fear of being fat. Orthorexics’ weight often plummets to anorexic\u00a0levels. But they differ from anorexics because they know they are thin\u00a0and want to gain weight.<\/p>\n

\"orthorexia\"<\/p>\n

It is no question that we are a culture that is extremely health conscious. We spend billions of dollars each year on diet products, books and supplements. But what makes orthorexia different than just abstaining from dairy, like vegans<\/a> do, or not consuming any refined sugars is that orthorexics are obsessed with keeping their food pure. They avoid all processed food in addition to many fresh fruits and vegetables if they are not organic or certified by certain organic standards. Most of their day is either spent preparing their own food or thinking about food. Their\u00a0obsession affects\u00a0all\u00a0aspects of their lives, particularly their\u00a0relationships, as activities like family meal times and\u00a0dining out\u00a0are\u00a0soon eliminated\u00a0as their pursuit to be pure\u00a0takes over.<\/p>\n

No one way of eating is shown to be a leading culprit in enabling someone to become orthorexic, but raw foodists <\/a>were associated with a higher risk of developing orthorexic tendencies.<\/p>\n

The result is that most orthorexics become dangerously thin, because as the list of foods they can eat becomes smaller and smaller, so does their body weight. One of the orthorexics featured on the ABC program died when her weight plummeted too low to support her body from functioning.<\/p>\n

As someone who is deeply involved in the yoga<\/a> community, I have encountered scores of people who have let their\u00a0desire to be healthy spiral out of control into a full-fledged addiction and obsession. I once met a man who\u00a0only ate beets and another who only ate one meal a day which was the same day after day. Looking at some of these extreme cases, vegetarianism <\/a>is a soft way of eating.<\/p>\n

I am sure that we have all met people who have quirky or bizarre eating habits or dietary preferences. But what makes orthorexia so alarming is that as our awareness of and preoccupation with health increases, the more likely it is that we will see more cases similar to those shown on last week’s television show. To learn more about this disorder and to educate yourself on some of the telltale signs of orthorexia, watch this video<\/a>.<\/p>\n

Learn more about Orthorexia and how to treat it, in this book Health Food Junkies<\/a>.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

On 20\/20 this past Friday night, they featured a new kind of an obsessive compulsive disorder called “orthorexia.” Orthorexics\u00a0are individuals who take eating healthy to an extreme. They avoid eating not just a few things like trans fats or meat, … Continue reading →<\/span><\/a><\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":6,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"_acf_changed":false,"footnotes":""},"categories":[3695],"tags":[333,971,31,29,1005,906,24],"class_list":["post-1186","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-diet-and-nutrition","tag-anorexia","tag-eating-disorders","tag-health-news","tag-nutrition","tag-orthorexia","tag-vegan","tag-vegetarian"],"acf":[],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/dietsinreview.com\/diet_column\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/1186","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/dietsinreview.com\/diet_column\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/dietsinreview.com\/diet_column\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/dietsinreview.com\/diet_column\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/6"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/dietsinreview.com\/diet_column\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=1186"}],"version-history":[{"count":2,"href":"https:\/\/dietsinreview.com\/diet_column\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/1186\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":5961,"href":"https:\/\/dietsinreview.com\/diet_column\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/1186\/revisions\/5961"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/dietsinreview.com\/diet_column\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=1186"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/dietsinreview.com\/diet_column\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=1186"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/dietsinreview.com\/diet_column\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=1186"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}