Is Trying to Eat Healthy Making You Sick?

By Erika Alexia Tsoukanelis, E Magazine. Posted July 30, 2009.

In a country where 34% of the population is obese, where 2,500 people die every day of heart disease and more than half a million perish of cancer each year, cultivating an unhealthy focus on healthy eating seems impossible. Yet some are so fixated on purifying their bodies that they make themselves sick in the process. It's a condition known as orthorexia nervosa.

© Lucinda Levine

What Is Orthorexia?

Holistic physician Steven Brat-man coined the term orthorexia nervosa more than a decade ago. In an article published in the October 1997 issue of Yoga Journal titled "Health Food Junkie," he wrote, "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." Even if physical and emotional health begin to falter, the sufferer continues a harsh dietary regime. Eventually, the all-consuming drive for nutritional purity can become a kind of spiritual quest.

"I think it's a very real problem," says health and nutrition author and teacher Tom Monte of Amherst, Mas-sachusetts. "As the problem becomes clearer, the description will expand because we'll have a better understanding of its internal causes."

Monte cites among these causes an imbalance of neurotransmitters, leading to a decrease in joy and an excess of fear. The more severe this imbalance, he says, the more the orthorexic feels antagonistic toward the environment, becoming hyperaware of external impurities.

But orthorexia has its skeptics, too. It's a refusal to eat healthy that's a national problem, say these doctors and nutritionists, not the reverse. Kelly Brownell, PhD, codirector of the Yale Center for Eating and Weight Disorders told the website WebMD, "We've never had anybody come to our clinic with [orthorexia], and I've been working in this field for at least 20 years."

See more stories tagged with: eating, healthy eating, orthorexia

Erika Alexia Tsoukanelis is a Connecticut-based writer and yoga instructor.

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