When Our Food Obsession Becomes Unhealthy
Orthorexia, a fear of food, is an eating disorder that has gained ground over the past few years. It’s not clinically recognized as a diagnosis, but nutrition experts have noticed an anecdotal increase in reports of orthorexia in recent years.
BBC News published the story of Eloise du Luart, a young student and triathlete competitor, whose diet may have appeared perfect on the surface but in reality masked a severely unhealthy relationship with food.
“Teach me how to eat again. Please,” she asks in the video, as she explains how she had convinced herself that her meticulous diet was what she needed for her triathlon training. She would make herself what she called “proats” for protein oats in the mornings — essentially oatmeal with some combination of 4+ superfoods. She would make excuses for why she couldn’t go out to restaurants or choose the restaurant ahead of time so that she knew she would be able to eat there. And as so many of us now do, she documented her meals on Instagram.
“It would have gone cold by the time I’d eaten it, just to make it look nice.” she admits, highlighting the lengths to which she went just to make her meals Instagram-worthy. Even a so-called “healthy” diet can become psychologically unhealthy if we create too many rules around our eating, attach reward and punishment to the foods we intake, or become too compulsive about regimenting our diet.
Nowadays, more and more people are choosing to participate in non-medically recommended elimination diets like Whole30, the Paleo diet, and veganism. The term “elimination diet” on its own is a vague concept. Medically, it is used to describe the process of eliminating foods from one’s diet in hopes of ascertaining the root causes of digestive problems or discomfort. It typically only requires the temporary elimination foods and allows patients to slowly reintroduce foods back into their diets. However, when used in the context of self-selected diets, it can also represent unhealthy attitudes or decisions regarding food.
“Anything that promotes an emphasis on what something looks like rather than how it makes you feel is probably going to be detrimental to body image and take away from eating mindfully,” Dr. Sarah Bellovin Goldman, a psychologist at Georgetown University, explained, referencing strict elimination diets in particular. “Any time you are creating a diet or a particular set of foods you’re supposed to eat, you’re not listening to your body.” This phenomenon occurs among people who choose to follow a form of elimination diet, like carb-free, gluten-free, sugar-free, etc., not for medical reasons, but out of personal preference and often the desire to lose weight.
While the diets aren’t necessarily forms of disordered eating in themselves, they have the potential to be harmful because of the psychological implications surrounding eating and because they are often examples of people restricting their diets in a certain way to assert control over something in their lives. Sarah suggests that any rules surrounding food have the potential to be harmful. As someone who works with clients who often have histories of eating disorders, she finds that on the surface, her clients may appear to have solid reasoning behind the pursuit of an elimination diet, but on a deeper level, the diets are often eating disorders masquerading themselves in a new form. One could argue that restricting yourself from any food is contradictory to the idea of listening to your body. She encourages her clients to think of the slogan, “rules break, guidelines bend.” Often rules are too rigid, whereas guidelines can still fit into the idea of moderation and intuitive eating.
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