Orthorexia or when a healthy lifestyle slowly destroys and kills you
Do you know people around you who seem to think a little bit of that healthy diet? Maybe it's a more serious thing than you can even think. Ortho (direct, correct), rexia (appetite - appetite). So total orthorexia. One word that can cause multiple problems. Orthorexia is described as a pathological obsession with healthy food, which does not contain pesticides, herbicides, preservatives and artificial additives. It is a fear to eat anything that is not "clean", ie "clean", as has already become established in our country. Unlike anorexia, people here are not so much about losing weight, rather the view of food consumption and overall lifestyle is addressed. However, militant adherence to such a diet can have negative social impacts, and over time, various nutritional deficiencies can begin to develop leading to health problems. The stories and facts below are for thought, and when reading them, one does not understand where this whole "healthy eating" can lead someone.
To support this concept, we can cite a case study of a 28-year-old, 1.59 meter tall woman hospitalized for malnutrition (this is actually a kind of deviation from the normal state of nutrition, which arises due to lack of nutrient intake). Her weight? 27 kg. No, that's not a typo. At the age of 14, she had intense acne, which was not improved by any methods. So she went to an herbalist, who advised her to throw out all fats from her diet (really amazing advice…). At the age of 16, she restricted various types of food until she became a lacto-vegetarian from the age of 18. When she was 24, she also removed eggs and dairy products from her diet. Its weight was already around 43 kilograms. However, she still didn't like it until she became a raw vegan. Her menstrual cycle stopped, her condition gradually worsened, until she was finally hospitalized.
General practitioner Steven Bratman began using the term orthorexia in 1997 and added the suffix nervosa. Steven defines orthorexia as "fixation on proper eating". In addition, he adds that we can safely label some people as "healthy food addicts." Simply put, in some cases it transcends all boundaries and their obsession with healthy food can negatively affect other activities, interests, even relationships, and ultimately this condition can be physically dangerous, as anorexia or bulimia are considered. A study of a sample of 994 people concluded that orthorexia has pathological attitudes and may be subject to obsessive-compulsive symptoms. However, orthorexia is still being debated and some views are controversial. For example, Kummer et al., Who also dealt with orthorexia, stated that this was nothing directly scientifically substantiated, but rather mass media. Well, we'll look at that "fabrication" in the stories a little below. In this study, which had some limitations, they partially confirmed that orthorexia seems to be a common eating disorder and especially for women who think about a "healthy and right" diet on a daily basis. This can ultimately translate into eating disorders in general.
But it wasn't just Dr. Bratman, thanks to whom this concept got into the world. Jordan, a 25-year-old blogger, is also to blame. But she had no idea where it would take her. Jordan was a raw vegan who built her fan base of tens of thousands of people by praising a healthy lifestyle and vegan diet. She considered it a panacea and the best possible way to eat. She hoped it was the right way to deal with her frequent stomach problems. Together with such speeches and beautiful photos made of green smoothies from kale, spinach and chia seeds, she built a fan base and she succeeded. And when you have tens of thousands of followers, you know what happens, right? She was approached by a vegan company that offered her extremely expensive detox products for free. So Jordan started detoxifying at least three times a week. Whenever she finished the detox and ate a full (er, um ...) meal, her stomach problems returned and they always came back a little more uncomfortable. She thought detoxes were the way to go and should do them more regularly. She jumped on the carousel, which was detox, hungry, emotional eating, guilt, and detox again. Jordan still had her eyes closed, and instead of deviating from veganism and trying something else to get along with, she started throwing out other foods from her vegan diet that she didn't think were so healthy and anxious to eat.
Her fixation on only a few foods was already at such a stage that she told her followers one thing: "I suffer from orthorexia and need help." When other media got caught up in it, there was a real boom and Jordan talks about reports that numbered more than ten thousand.
Nutritional Therapist Dr. Karin Kratina has been specializing in the treatment of eating disorders for 30 years and says: “As a nutritional therapist, I see an exponential increase in patients with orthorexia. I have at least one person with these symptoms every week. This is a serious problem. I don't think it's bad to be a vegetarian or a vegan, but the problem is that people moralize eating, weight, food and exercise. "
Another blogger, vegan Ella, whose Instagram boasts more than a million followers, makes us all think that eating healthy will make us feel great. I would not be against this statement, because there is certainly such a connection, but at the same time there are people who take it all literally, inflate it 4 times and make a picture of the #eatclean hashtag over the bed. Beautiful rich color photos of a tasty spinach-cucumber-cabbage sheikh may look good on a monitor, but many fall into the trap of taking extreme restrictions on a healthy diet into a handful and food is the answer to everything. I mean, healthy food, of course. They are slaves to food, often emotionally and physically exhausted. They often live their lives only on social networks and try to convince themselves that two pieces of carrot with soy bread are such an amazing and healthy food. We all know what people are like. "And… but ... she also drinks and looks amazing", so they start drinking green smoothies, adding them to Instagram and the left half of the brain screams hungry, while the right half invents fit hashtags on Instagram.
Another nice sad example is Kaila. She suffered from orthorexia for 10 years, but no one really knew how to help her, and companies beat her up because she did not suffer from the symptoms of anorexia and something like orthorexia is not on the official list. Kaila ate so healthy and restrictive that she was very ill. And as a bonus, she lost her menstrual cycle. That would still be okay (no, it wasn't), but Kaila had to struggle with a few bouts of depression, and suicidal thoughts weren't foreign to her. After many years of suffering, he came to Dr. Bratman and discovered the concept of orthorexia. And that helped her. She found that they did not know the way here and that it was necessary to change her thinking and attitude towards diet.
A similar case happened in 2013. Another fan of a healthy lifestyle wanted to lose 5 pounds, discovered Paleo eating and hoped that this was the right way to help her lose weight and to draw the benefits written everywhere from this eating style. Help. Although she lost weight, Paleo's lifestyle suddenly transformed into an obsession with food and consumed only vegetables, coconut oil and lean meat. People who hadn't seen her for a long time began to compliment her on how great she looked. There were more compliments and she was literally dependent on them. She was afraid of any other food and began to argue when her roommates called her to China. "You're crazy, one Wonton soup won't kill you," they told her. "What they didn't know was that such a soup also contained a devil named wheat." Well, probably no one wanted to look for an exorcist, so she always refused similar invitations. Exhausted under the weight of her own madness, she had anxiety attacks and eventually went for treatment. The therapist diagnosed her with OCD, but she continued on a strict Paleo diet, compliments warmed her heart, and she had constant anxiety attacks.
You can see that the obsession with a healthy diet is here among us and many people suffer from it, whether they are men, but especially women. We are no longer surprised when in our Fitclan coaching we receive in the order in many cases an addendum that she has such and that health problem and we are also not surprised when she is surprised that we can incorporate almost anything into the diet, of course within the possibilities and goals . I think that some of your friends also suffer from orthorexia, because there are still a lot of people who don't go on a day trip with a party, because their bodybuilding tilapia on salt-free water with broccoli every 90 minutes takes precedence. People, at least understand the basics of nutrition and know that chicken and vegetables are not the only way. And correctly, the given sentence would be the only thing without that word. We are people and a healthy lifestyle should be something that makes us happy and not that we become stupid slaves of food.
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