ORTHOREXIA DID YOU SEE THIS?

[RAINRA]

HEY I CAN'T BELIEVE THIS WHEN I SAW THIS.

http://www.ecorazzi.com/2008/07/09/local-television-news-station-reports-orthorexia-is-on-the-rise/#comments

[Marcina]

For some reason the video won't play for me.. It probably will on my home computer. I'm using a PC right now (PC = Piece-o Crap)

 

I think Orthorexia can be classified as an eating disorder if someone takes healthy eating so far that it is harmful to one's health. At one point, I refused to eat so many kinds of foods that I restricted my caloric intake to the point where I got sick. I was only eating raw foods at the time but didn't take into consideration that my body needed more fat than I was giving it. I lost weight, and got exhausted and eventually got sick from it.

 

It's important to eat healthy, definately.. But sometimes "healthy eating" to some people means no fat allowed.. Which is what my frame of mind was in. This is obviously bad for the health.

[cubby2112]

I am orthorexic because I refuse to eat the same shit the masses do. I think it is those people who choose to continue to put stuff in their bodies they know is destroying them who have the real mental disorder.

[beforewisdom]

I've been into nutrition since I was 14 and that interest pushed me to go vegetarian at that age. I heard the term orthorexia back then. I don't think they showed an example of orthorexia in the piece but I've met people who fit the bill. They exist. They are so obsessed with particular standards of food ( and those standards are not founded on FACTS usually ), that they end up hardly eating at all. Then they are always thinking about food, obsessing over it in some way.

 

Though she wasn't a vegan, that woman they talked to at the end of the piece was honest about her attitude of feeling superior for being a health nut. I see that attitude a lot in the health nut vegan scene. People doing one-up-manship with how extreme they can make their diets because they get an ego boost out of it. For some people, conscious or not, their diet becomes a means of making themselves feel special or powerful.

 

I had a case of that BS during my teen years.

[Marcina]

Sometimes I feel like snob because of my obsession with eating healthy.

I've learned to let go and have a couple potato chips at a party. It's not gonna make me fat if I have a few haha.

[Jessifly]

I can see how this can be a serious concern to people who actually starve from limiting their food intake in the extreme (causing malnutrition)... but I think maybe this clip gives the wrong impression to viewers about so called health-conscious diets. Perhaps making viewers think that anyone who refuses to eat anything other than organic, pesticide-free, vegan, macrobiotic, etc or will only eat at home or feels socially isolated or feels superior through diet may have this condition. While that could be the case for these examples the majority of people with these "symptoms" are not starving, the focus of the clip should be more on starvation/malnutrition through extreme obsessive-compulsive eating habits. Otherwise it just sounds like a silly label.. and for some reason it seems like some people (like perhaps the healthy-looking woman in the clip?) like to have labels/diagnoses to group themselves into....

[beforewisdom]

Otherwise it just sounds like a silly label.. and for some reason it seems like some people (like perhaps the healthy-looking woman in the clip?) like to have labels/diagnoses to group themselves into....

 

I didn't think that woman was that healthy looking. The silly label thing goes both ways. There are no shortage of long, nasty threads on vegan web boards about people who eat diets similar to a vegan diet, but who want to be called a vegan. Labels matter to people, even when they don't get anything for it.