Aphids and Tinfoil Hats: One Mom's Struggle with Orthorexia

Guest Post By Denise Kesler Olson

Orthorexia. It was a word I’d never heard back in early 2010 when I plopped down on the couch to watch a documentary with my husband. In many ways, I was much more naïve about everything back then, but I would not have admitted it, and I’m sure even if someone had tried to educate me about what that word meant, I wouldn’t have listened. The documentary I was about to watch that day, Food Inc, sent me hurtling down a dark hole where, let’s face it, there was nothing but tinfoil hats at the bottom. I didn’t know that at the time, however. A friend and simply recommended we watch the program on Netflix.

Food Inc. was all about how modern food companies and the processes to get food to the consumer were bad. Honestly, I can’t really remember the specifics of that particular documentary—its blurred together with so many similar-themed ones I watched---but I can remember what I took away from it: modern agriculture=bad. Organic food=less bad. You the consumer=powerless against “big food”.

I took the message to heart, and I had my reasons. I really wanted to believe that it wasn’t my fault that loved to overeat. I really didn’t want to face the fact that food made me feel powerless and out of control. I needed someone to blame. Somewhere there had to be a bad guy hurting me, and a faceless evil conglomerate of corporations became the perfect scapegoat. I had just had my third baby, and the weight I had gained with that pregnancy was clinging stubbornly to midsection and now I “knew” the reason why: Big Ag was the reason I couldn’t lose weight. Big Food was making me fat. Nature wanted me to be thin. I just needed to try to return to nature.

Over the next two years I changed my lifestyle in relation to food by slowly narrowing the foods that were “allowed”, and I did get thinner. I subscribed to a bunch of email services that delivered lists of “good” and “bad” foods to my inbox every day, along with huge lists of foods additives I needed to avoid because they were linked to all sorts of terrible illnesses and disorders. I agonized over these lists and tried to determine how to stretch my food budget so as to include more organic, miracle foods and less foods with scary-sounding chemicals. I found myself believing that the food at the store was not “safe” and only the food I produced myself was trustworthy.

Despite having a “bad guy” to blame for my unhealthy relationship with food, the guilt and fear I felt were far from abating. I felt guilty every day over not being able to provide my children “the best”. I had nowhere to store a side of organic beef. I didn’t have the money to feed them organic, local produce every day, and I worried about the pesticides and herbicides spayed on the fruits and veggies in the grocery stores. I tried in vain to find some organic wheat I could use (I already ground my own flour, but it was from conventional wheat.) Everywhere I turned it seemed my friends in the movement were doing “better” than I was. Their diets were more pure and their children were more natural. They bragged about how much they sacrificed for organic foods, and I found myself struggling within my limited budget to feed a my family.

The greatest source of fear and guilt, however, were the times when I ventured outside the food haven that I had made my home. Often, when faced with the tantalizing aromas of foods I used to eat, I caved to temptation and pigged out just as I had in the past. Overeating lead to feelings of unworthiness and calling myself a weak hypocrite. I often cried at the idea that I “deserved” to be fat, and that all the people I knew who were thin somehow tried harder and ate better than me.

After the birth of my fourth child, there came a point that I consider to be the lowest point of my orthorexia and food paranoia. I often relaxed and de-stressed in my garden planted with expensive organic seeds. I took a lot of care to make sure it was weeded and healthy, and, of course, I never treated the plants or soil with any pesticides or herbicides. I found the work relaxing and rewarding. That winter, there was an invasion of aphids that attacked my pumpkin plants. I researched online and tried every sort of “natural” method I could find to cure them, but it was all in vain. I went out faithfully each day and washed the aphids off the leaves of the pumpkin plants, but the excess water did not drain well in the clay soil in which they were planted. These tedious efforts only efforts only served to weaken the plants with overwatering. I tried a soapy solution, but it built up residue on the plants large leaves and caused the hot sun to burn them more easily, all without ridding the plants of aphids for very long. Finally, I realized the whole thing was hopeless. Devastated and feeling like a total failure, I shut the door to my backyard, and vowed not to go out until all the expensive heirloom pumpkin plants were dead. I could not enjoy my garden any longer. I didn’t “deserve” it.

It was by accident that I finally saw my orthorexia for the unscientific paranoia that it was, and it took a terrible life event to do it. When my youngest child was three months old, he was hospitalized for a serious illness. Although he eventually recovered, the repercussions for our family were enormous. You see, despite my devotion to all things natural when it came to food, I had a secret. I had continued vaccinating my children on schedule. I had decided that I would simply forgo “new” vaccines since I had been fine without them. Many of my friends who shared my “food values” often shared information on social media about the dangers of vaccination, but I could never bring myself to believe their line of reasoning. After the illness left my son unable to be vaccinated for a short time, I began to appreciate the need for others to be vaccinated in order to protect him. I began to think of what a miracle modern medicine had been in my family, and—for the first time ever—I began to really care about vaccines. In fact, I cared so much that I began to argue with my friends who were against them, especially online.

Because of these arguments, I began reading everything that the pro-vaccine community had to offer. I also began to notice a pattern: none of the people who were knowledgeable about vaccines were afraid of conventional produce. In fact, the same sources that were providing me great ammunition when debating those who were against vaccinations, often had articles that were in support of GMOs. At first I resisted this information with the justification that “we couldn’t agree on everything”, but slowly those walls began to come down. I realized that I did not really have the higher ground in accepting science. Here I was begging friends of mine to agree with the mountain of evidence that vaccines were safe and effective, but I was in denial when it came to the scientific consensus about food additives and GMOs. I also sheepishly realized that I never bothered to fact check the fear-based agenda that I had bought into and built my life around.

I learned some important truths when it came to food once I finally started to look at the credible research. I’ll share them below.

1. The companies that produce food for mass consumption do make plenty of products with flaws and junk foods are definitely unhealthy. But they aren’t unhealthy because of additives. They’re unhealthy because of the fat, sugar, and salt content.

2. Clinging to an idealized version of the past will not help people get the healthy food they need today. Foods need to be grown in large quantities and preserved. There is no way of getting around that.

3. Most of the foods we eat today are not “natural” at all. They were developed by humans to taste good to humans. It is wrong to say that they are perfect the way they are because they way they are has changed. It is not wrong to try to improve a food’s usefulness to humans.

4. Reducing the use of pesticide and herbicide, as well as monitoring their impact on the environment is important, but paranoia about synthetic fertilizers and pesticides is not helping. Many organic pesticides are broad spectrum pesticides and actually damage the environment more by killing more insects than just those destroying the crops.

5. Letting my pumpkins die rather than treat them with judiciously used pesticide was a waste of the human controlled resources (such as water, seeds, and fossils fuels to ship seeds and pump water).

It has taken me a little while to completely let go.  Now I recognize that what happened to me happened because of a combination of factors (such as a natural fear of contamination and the persuasive story-telling in those scary documentaries), but at the heart of the situation was the fear of being overweight and unattractive. I was afraid of desiring food too much, so I had been choosing less desirable food on purpose to stay thin. I’d had an eating disorder. It might have been a more socially acceptable eating disorder. But it was an eating disorder. It was othrorexia. Nature didn’t want me to be thin; the code she’d left in my DNA wanted me to eat freely when food was available. I had bought into the idea that it was the end-all be-all for me.

I know at this point there are some people who think that I was “healthier” when I was obsessed with food because I was thinner, or that I’m just trying to justify being fat. That’s not true. My mental heath matters, and so does yours. Those who are orthorexic have poor mental health.

If you are showing orthorexic behaviors right now, I’d invite you to take a closer look at the reasoning behind your choices. Ask yourself, is the real issue for me my weight or appearance? Am I afraid of being “contaminated”? Do I feel out of control around certain foods and believe them to be evil or bad? Would I still choose to eat this way if my weight would stay the same no matter what? Am I enjoying life or am I busy being paranoid about food?

For me, the cost was too high. I still tend to overeat when I am happy and relaxed. I still have to work to keep my weight within a healthy range, but I can do so using an evidence-based approach to food. And while it might not be as romantic, it is certainly more fun. (Because cake.)