Sport Orthorexia: What's Your Opinion

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spicypumpkin

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I'm interested in psychology so I do a lot of random reading on the internet. I have heard of Orthorexia before, so I looked it up and found a site all about it.

Here's a passage from the site explaining what it is and why it is an eating disorder:

"Orthorexia Nervosa

Many of the most unbalanced people I have ever met are those who have devoted themselves to healthy eating. In fact, I believe some of them have actually contracted a novel eating disorder for which I have coined the name "orthorexia nervosa." The term uses "ortho," meaning straight, correct, and true, to modify "anorexia nervosa." Orthorexia nervosa refers to a pathological fixation on eating proper food.

Orthorexia begins, innocently enough, as a desire to overcome chronic illness or to improve general health. But because it requires considerable willpower to adopt a diet that differs radically from the food habits of childhood and the surrounding culture, few accomplish the change gracefully. Most must resort to an iron self-discipline bolstered by a hefty dose of superiority over those who eat junk food. Over time, what to eat, how much, and the consequences of dietary indiscretion come to occupy a greater and greater proportion of the orthorexic's day.

The act of eating pure food begins to carry pseudospiritual connotations. As orthorexia progresses, a day filled with sprouts, umeboshi plums, and amaranth biscuits comes to feel as holy as one spent serving the poor and homeless. When an orthorexic slips up (which may involve anything from devouring a single raisin to consuming a gallon of Haagen Dazs ice cream and a large pizza), he experiences a fall from grace and must perform numerous acts of penitence. These usually involve ever-stricter diets and fasts.

This "kitchen spirituality" eventually reaches a point where the sufferer spends most of his time planning, purchasing, and eating meals. The orthorexic's inner life becomes dominated by efforts to resist temptation, self-condemnation for lapses, self-praise for success at complying with the chosen regime, and feelings of superiority over others less pure in their dietary habits.

This transference of all of life's value into the act of eating makes orthorexia a true disorder. In this essential characteristic, orthorexia bears many similarities to the two well-known eating disorders anorexia and bulimia. Where the bulimic and anorexic focus on the quantity of food, the orthorexic fixates on its quality. All three give food an excessive place in the scheme of life."
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From:

Written By: Steven Bratman, M.D.


So my question is, what's your take on this? Where should the line be drawn between conscious eating and a full blown eating disorder? My personal opinion is that things like raw veganism and fruitarianism fall into the eating disorder category. I would also say that compulsively weighing food before eating it is a sign of a disorder (unless you have been directed by a doctor or health professional to do so). I want to hear your opinions though. Is this guy on to something?
 
Makes a lot of sense to me. After reading through it, it might seem like I am afflicted by this disorder - although It doesn't take over my life as much as this would imply, so I guess I'm ok.

For me - my health had been a concern for about 3-4 years now, I must say that if I did not dedicate a good portion of my life to my cause I would not have been successful with some of the goals I have accomplished. Some people don't really have a choice but to really be afflicted by this disorder since they are probably in a critical position have have no other choice but to devote a good portion of their time to this problem in order to succeed, hence it might make them seem like they are possessed with having a healthy lifestyle.

My personal opinion is that things like raw veganism and fruitarianism fall into the eating disorder category.
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Yes, I think it's quite psychological as well - someone I know hates veggies because it was forced onto him when he was young, now it's as if he refused to eat them to have revenge.

Odd...ain't it?

Yes, I'd say he's onto something. But I'm no expert on psychology...although I have quite a bit of interest in this field...A lot of people might take offense from this but meh, they need to help themselves a little if you ask me.

Spicy, you ever study in psycology, other than reading random things on the net? I'm curious...


Insightful post...thanks spicy.


Eric
 
I think it's an obvious disorder that's quiet apparent with some members of the forum; Chillen is the obvious example where his exact intake is monitored on an Excel document. The question is whether it's such a bad thing? It's not going to kill you like anorexia so assuming the illness doesn't impact on other areas of the persons life then it's possibly a good thing
 
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If you look at the whole site, there's a story of a woman who became so obsessed with only eating clean and healthy things that she essentially starved to death. It seems like an extreme case, but her original intent was to get healthy, not lose weight. I guess that's the only case where it could kill you. But I'm under the firm belief that any diet which severely limits the ingestion of food we were made to eat like meat, for example, is not as healthy as the zealots make it out to be.

Living in the part of the country I do, I have happened upon a lot of people who have adopted the vegan lifestyle partly because it's in fashion and partly because it gives them some sense of control. It gives them something to identify with and it makes them special. "Hey, look at me, I'm a vegan!" Here's the case where the quality of the food and the social implications of eating it take precedence over the enjoyment gained from eating it. The health benefits are also only perceived health benefits. I know there's someone out there who could argue, with scientific data, that a diet consisting entirely of meat is the best option. So who do we believe?

Regardless of whether or not we eat meat, I think every person has experienced some amount of disordered eating where food, and the quality of it, is emphasized too much. It's unavoidable with all of the ads telling us what to heat and how to be "healthy". I think it's our job to tune out the noise and eat sensibly, but not obsessively.

As for studying psychology, I've taken a couple of classes here and there and it interests me. I may look into it as a major, but I'm not sure yet.
 
Same as everything else, it's only a problem if you consider it one. What he's describing is substantially different from a healthy preoccupation. Couple of examples:

I have a friend who's convinced she's a sex addict. I tell her that unless she's failing out of school, loses her job, drives her car off a bridge and wears herself raw because she can't stop having sex, I really don't think it's an issue. She leads a good life and just happens to have a very strong sex drive. This is not a disorder.

For myself, most of my friends consider me to have become some sort of a crazy person because I track everything I'm doing with regard to nutrition and fitness. But I'm not really worried about it, because I know their assessment is inchoate and irrational. I track everything, and not because I have OCD, but because efficiency makes more sense than wastefulness from every perspective except the nihilist (which is entirely ridiculous - it's self-negating!).

What I do actually saves me a great deal of time. I spend on average an hour less per day measuring, preparing, consuming, cleaning up after, logging, analyzing and adjusting than most people I know do simply throwing together random crap and swallowing it. Add to this the fact that the total amount of time I spend exercising each day is considerably less than half the amount nearly everyone else I know spends watching television (which I do not do) and you get the same conclusion: This is not a disorder.

But what the OP's talking about is. I find most of psychology ridiculous because simple concepts are taken and overcomplicated to make it seem as if expertise is required to observe and critique human drives. It's really, really not. All you ask yourself is this: "Does the behavior have a net positive or a net negative impact on the quality of my life?" Now of course you need to have some pretty serious foundations to ask (which is to say, "qualify") the question in the first place, but once you do it's not at all complex.

You might also want to ask, "Where's the disorder for people preoccupied with watching someone else pretend to do what they could be doing if they weren't sitting around staring?" That is a much, much more common ailment. Read books! Old ones.
 
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spicypumpkin said:
I would also say that compulsively weighing food before eating it is a sign of a disorder (unless you have been directed by a doctor or health professional to do so). I want to hear your opinions though. Is this guy on to something?
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This is where I would disagree. Weighing out food is the easiest way to do portion control and count calories.
 
evolution said:
This is where I would disagree. Weighing out food is the easiest way to do portion control and count calories.
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She did say compulsively. I interpret that as doing it every time, even when you've already memorized how much it is. Compulsions imply a sense of irrational adherence to a behavior. For example if you told me to provide you with 0.2, 0.4, 0.6, 0.8 or 1.0 oz of almonds, I could do so with remarkable accuracy by simply grabbing a handful out of the jar. So, I'm always aware of how much it is, and so I don't feel compelled to weigh it.

However, I agree with you in that if I didn't, I would weigh it, but I wouldn't call it a "compulsion". It's simply the difference between being precise and half-assing. In psychology, caring about anything (see: attention to detail) is some sort of disorder. Apparently the mentally perfect human is very nearly neutral about everything - no, wait, they have a disorder for that too. (Schizoid personality, if anyone's wondering).
 
I've only known one person who weighed out his food for every meal and he also took orders from a talking Yoda and claimed the government were putting gay images in the paint on his bedroom walls to try and turn him gay (seriously, that's true, I worked with him for two years).

I think that anything that's done as a compulsion is a sign of something being wrong mentally but a compulsion is very different from someone doing something as part of a routine
 
spicypumpkin said:
I'm interested in psychology so I do a lot of random reading on the internet. I have heard of Orthorexia before, so I looked it up and found a site all about it.

Here's a passage from the site explaining what it is and why it is an eating disorder:



From:

Written By: Steven Bratman, M.D.


So my question is, what's your take on this? Where should the line be drawn between conscious eating and a full blown eating disorder? My personal opinion is that things like raw veganism and fruitarianism fall into the eating disorder category. I would also say that compulsively weighing food before eating it is a sign of a disorder (unless you have been directed by a doctor or health professional to do so). I want to hear your opinions though. Is this guy on to something?
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I think like many things in life, it works differently on different people...some people start to diet and they hear that they need to exercise more than they eat so they turn anorexic.

I think that certain personality types could be subject to this.
Same goes for the fitness buffs...the ones that think about how everything they do could directly be related to fitness and how they could make it part of their fitness or health. So they eat perfectly every day, workout regularly and even at work you see them doing deadlifts with the box of printer paper, not to impress or for fun but because they see it as another way to work out...


This is just how some people are...
 
I'm orthorexic, and it led me to the hospital at 82 lbs. I still have this disorder, but i'm at a healthy 105 now. I agree; it's not a problem unless you're harming yourself or others.
I'm still vegan, too. Thinking about going raw once I'm on my own.
 
I think it depends on your mindset.

I think each individual person has a right to eat and to know what they're eating. However, reading your description of the disorder, probably 90% of the people on this forum would have that disorder by pure definition alone.

I would say it's a eating disorder only if it contradicts what you truly want. Sort of like saying No when you mean Yes, or vice versa. It could also be a front you put on only when you're with others. For example, some people would order salad or health food options when they are with others. Recently, I noticed someone bought cake for a birthday party, but yet they wouldn't touch it citing that they aren't hungry.

You recommended me a book a while back titled Intuitive Eating, and I think it's explained in there quite well on being true to yourself. Only when you aren't is when it becomes a disorder and eventually it overpowers you and you go into a episode of mass eating or extreme dieting/fasting. The idea is to eat what you think is right, and not follow a trend.

Let's pretend you follow two ideas that are on the opposite ends. Let's say you get a pure cake diet, then a pure salad diet. You would eventually break on both spectrums because it isn't true to what you want to eat.

The problem with modern diets is that it doesn't follow what a person needs or wants; it only follows a certain pseudo standard. The problem is that the standard aren't well placed. For example, recently in a McDonalds commercial, I saw that a mom and her older son decided to spend some "alone" time, and they went to McDonalds. She ordered a salad, and her son had 100% pure white meat chicken nuggets. What would this tell mothers out there? Not only that, sometimes people develop personal pseudo standards, and say if they eat more than one candy bar, then they "broke" their own rule. The problem is that you're not true to yourself and you're following a standard that has "all or nothing" rules applied, and if you break one, you punish yourself.
 
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