One of my most painful experiences with “crunchy” living,
and one of the reasons I’ve largely left it behind, was because of the hell I
went through due to a little-known, yet very common, eating disorder:
orthorexia. Orthorexia is when “healthy” or “green” diets go too far, and
become serious compulsion.
Let me be clear here: eating healthy is not a disorder. Being conscientious of how your diet affects the planet is not an eating disorder. Orthorexia is when a well-meaning person starts out eating healthy but eventually becomes so obsessed with their dietary choices that it becomes incapacitating or injurious. I consider myself very lucky that I not only recovered from orthorexia (and can now shamelessly eat a Snickers) but that I got treatment and help before it harmed my children.
My struggle with orthorexia began when I was 18 years old and decided to switch to a vegan diet. Many people are able to eat a vegan diet without it becoming a problem for them at all, but I’m not as lucky. Because I suffer from clinical anxiety with features of OCD, veganism quickly turned from a conscientious diet to a serious eating disorder. Nothing passed my lips without careful consideration of how it impacted my health, the safety of animals, and the planet we live on. I would wring my hands over unsustainable packaging and panic over accidental ingestion of trace amounts of dairy.
Paradoxically, my strict all-natural vegan diet caused me to gain massive amounts of weight while also causing me to suffer from serious nutritional deficiencies. My weight skyrocketed by nearly fifty pounds in six months—quite a bit for my naturally small frame—but I felt weak and sick. I shivered constantly and felt nauseated and exhausted. Blood work later showed that I was perilously anemic from deficiencies in iron and B12, two nutrients that are often lacking in a strict and unsupplemented vegan diet.
At my doctor’s insistence, I went from vegan to ovo-lacto-vegetarian, but my food-related compulsions just changed form instead of going away completely. Over the course of the three years that followed, my fears and fixations related to food became even more intense and pathological. Everything I ate had to be organic and “natural,” and while I’d eat animal products, they unnerved me. This was also—unfortunately?—the time during which I gave birth to my daughter and breastfed her.
She was very healthy from birth and thrived on my breast milk, but it came at my expense. Because organic, natural foods cost 4 times the competition, and because I refused to eat anything that didn’t fit those criteria, it meant that I went hungry more often than not. A rational person who eats a healthy diet knows that it’s better to have a balanced meal that might contain MSG than to eat nothing at all, but “rational” was no longer part of my lexicon. So, while orthorexia had initially caused me extreme weight gain, it made a U-turn and caused just the opposite: extreme weight loss.
When my daughter was a year old and I was breastfeeding her despite being dangerously underweight myself, I stepped out of bed one morning and heard a crunch, and felt agonizing pain in my foot. It swelled to the size of a softball and I went to the emergency room, where I was informed that I had broken my foot and that my bones were extremely thin and brittle. I was only twenty-two but I had osteoporosis caused by breastfeeding while suffering from malnutrition. And that wasn’t all. The hospital scale said that I weighed a frightening 101 pounds, at 5’6” tall. If I didn’t get a handle on this, it could kill me.
I eventually got better, thanks to a combination of counseling and medication. It turns out that “Big Pharma” and their evil plot to treat me for anxiety and OCD features, wasn’t actually such a bad idea after all. Human bodies are remarkably adaptive. My bones are now healthy and strong and I had no nutrition-related complications while pregnant with, or breastfeeding, my son. despite my previous run-ins with malnutrition. I have been a healthy weight for four years. It’s still a bit of an effort—when I’m stressed, I sometimes don’t want to eat anything but organic salad—but I am, overall, recovered from my experience with orthorexia.
There’s nothing wrong with being conscientious. A diet rich in fruits, vegetables, and whole grains is the cornerstone of good health. And, of course, it’s important to be aware of how your dietary choices impact the environment and the welfare of animals. I’m still glad to say that I minimize the amount of cruelty involved in my diet and that my food choices have the lowest possible impact on the planet while also meeting my nutritional needs. But I’m even more glad to say that I’m done prioritizing the ethics of my diet over the ultimate goal of keeping myself healthy and sane.
Let me be clear here: eating healthy is not a disorder. Being conscientious of how your diet affects the planet is not an eating disorder. Orthorexia is when a well-meaning person starts out eating healthy but eventually becomes so obsessed with their dietary choices that it becomes incapacitating or injurious. I consider myself very lucky that I not only recovered from orthorexia (and can now shamelessly eat a Snickers) but that I got treatment and help before it harmed my children.
My struggle with orthorexia began when I was 18 years old and decided to switch to a vegan diet. Many people are able to eat a vegan diet without it becoming a problem for them at all, but I’m not as lucky. Because I suffer from clinical anxiety with features of OCD, veganism quickly turned from a conscientious diet to a serious eating disorder. Nothing passed my lips without careful consideration of how it impacted my health, the safety of animals, and the planet we live on. I would wring my hands over unsustainable packaging and panic over accidental ingestion of trace amounts of dairy.
Paradoxically, my strict all-natural vegan diet caused me to gain massive amounts of weight while also causing me to suffer from serious nutritional deficiencies. My weight skyrocketed by nearly fifty pounds in six months—quite a bit for my naturally small frame—but I felt weak and sick. I shivered constantly and felt nauseated and exhausted. Blood work later showed that I was perilously anemic from deficiencies in iron and B12, two nutrients that are often lacking in a strict and unsupplemented vegan diet.
At my doctor’s insistence, I went from vegan to ovo-lacto-vegetarian, but my food-related compulsions just changed form instead of going away completely. Over the course of the three years that followed, my fears and fixations related to food became even more intense and pathological. Everything I ate had to be organic and “natural,” and while I’d eat animal products, they unnerved me. This was also—unfortunately?—the time during which I gave birth to my daughter and breastfed her.
She was very healthy from birth and thrived on my breast milk, but it came at my expense. Because organic, natural foods cost 4 times the competition, and because I refused to eat anything that didn’t fit those criteria, it meant that I went hungry more often than not. A rational person who eats a healthy diet knows that it’s better to have a balanced meal that might contain MSG than to eat nothing at all, but “rational” was no longer part of my lexicon. So, while orthorexia had initially caused me extreme weight gain, it made a U-turn and caused just the opposite: extreme weight loss.
When my daughter was a year old and I was breastfeeding her despite being dangerously underweight myself, I stepped out of bed one morning and heard a crunch, and felt agonizing pain in my foot. It swelled to the size of a softball and I went to the emergency room, where I was informed that I had broken my foot and that my bones were extremely thin and brittle. I was only twenty-two but I had osteoporosis caused by breastfeeding while suffering from malnutrition. And that wasn’t all. The hospital scale said that I weighed a frightening 101 pounds, at 5’6” tall. If I didn’t get a handle on this, it could kill me.
I eventually got better, thanks to a combination of counseling and medication. It turns out that “Big Pharma” and their evil plot to treat me for anxiety and OCD features, wasn’t actually such a bad idea after all. Human bodies are remarkably adaptive. My bones are now healthy and strong and I had no nutrition-related complications while pregnant with, or breastfeeding, my son. despite my previous run-ins with malnutrition. I have been a healthy weight for four years. It’s still a bit of an effort—when I’m stressed, I sometimes don’t want to eat anything but organic salad—but I am, overall, recovered from my experience with orthorexia.
There’s nothing wrong with being conscientious. A diet rich in fruits, vegetables, and whole grains is the cornerstone of good health. And, of course, it’s important to be aware of how your dietary choices impact the environment and the welfare of animals. I’m still glad to say that I minimize the amount of cruelty involved in my diet and that my food choices have the lowest possible impact on the planet while also meeting my nutritional needs. But I’m even more glad to say that I’m done prioritizing the ethics of my diet over the ultimate goal of keeping myself healthy and sane.
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