Just in case you thought your meat-free, gluten-free, exercise-twice-a-day lifestyle put you in the clear for all maladies and diagnoses, I’m hear to bear some bad news. You can, in fact, be TOO healthy.

Okay, so maybe this isn’t really news to most of you. Most of us are balanced enough to know that there can be too much of a good thing. But did you know that there’s a (somewhat hotly) contested term out there to describe individuals who take health a bit too far.

The term “Orthorexia nervosa” was coined by Steven Bratman, MD, a California doctor and author of the book, Health Food Junkies. If it sounds like anorexia nervosa, both in terminology and in meaning, that’s because the parallels are striking. The newer term is derived from the Greek “ortho,” which means “right,” or “correct,” and refers to individuals who develop an unhealthy obsession with foods that they consider healthy or pure in some way.

Bratman admits that he actually developed the term orthorexia as a joke, a way to “tease” his diet-obsessed patients and help them see that their obsessions were just as dangerous as those of patients with diagnosable eating disorders. However, he says that over time the term took on a darker, more serious significance, and he began to see patients whose health-obsession was putting them at risk of death.

So what makes a person “orthorexic”?

This is where the debate arises, because there are no evidenced-based criteria for this disorder. Advocates of the diagnosis suggest that a person may have orthorexia if he or she spend inordinate amounts of time in food-based thought and become so restrictive in what he or she will eat so as to be at risk for health problems.

Some individuals who have been diagnosed (unofficially – “orthorexia” is not included in the diagnostic manual used by health professionals) report thinking about what foods are “safe and pure” for hours each day. They plan meals much in advance, pour over nutrition labels and ingredient lists, and spend much of their time researching origins of their food. It’s also common to see these individuals become increasingly restrictive in their food choices, going going from eating only lean meat to becoming vegetarian, then vegan, then eating only raw foods.

“Many of the most unbalanced people I have ever met are those have devoted themselves to healthy eating,” says Bratman, on his website.

Well, that’s a bit of an extreme statement. I cannot say that this has been particularly true in my own observation. However, Bratman’s bold statement should not overshadow the point that eating healthy does not mean you ARE healthy.

If you’ve spent more than two minutes on this site or happened to have read my guest post on Healthy Living Blogs, you are well aware that I firmly believe that health encompasses not only the physical, but the mental, emotional, and spiritual as well. These various aspects of our lives must be in balance in order to achieve true wellness. Thus, when our supposed “healthy eating” becomes obsessive – to the point where the thought of eating something outside our strict regimen causes intense anxiety or our food habits prevent us from being able to connect with others and ourselves – well, there might be a problem.

This is not to say that anyone who chooses to follow a vegetarian lifestyle, for example, has orthorexia. Same for those for whom a special prescribed diet (due to health complications) that requires a bit more time and forethought. In fact, in an interview on Jezebel.com, Bratman warned against misinterpreting the term and applying to it people that are “overly-obsessed with diet” and should “lighten up a little.”

Orthorexia refers instead to a small class of people who take their eating habits to the extreme at the risk of hurting themselves, and it may in fact be more related to an obsessive compulsive disorder than an eating disorder, though these issues are often related as well. If you’re concerned that you may have a problem, you can check out Bratman’s ten-question quiz from his book. However, please don’t (and never!) substitute the results of an online quiz for consultation with a medical professional.

What do you think of the idea of orthorexia? Do you believe there’s such thing as eating too healthy?

Welcome back to the Tips for Recovery Series! Again, a small hiatus (this time to address Girls on the Run), but now we’re back for the final tip…

To review, in this series I’m sharing with you some tips for eating disorder recovery. However, these tips can really apply to any of us who have ever struggled with disordered eating, emotional eating, or simply live in a world where eating has become distorted and complex (I believe that would be all of  us, unless you live on a planet to which I want to move!). Don’t forget to leave your own tips in the comment section below or e-mail me at nourishthesoulblog@gmail.com! ____________________________________________________________________________________________

If you missed any of the previous tips, you can find them here:

Tip 1: Develop Empathy for Your Body

Tip 2: Stop Supporting the Culture of Thinness

Tip 3: Take a Risk!

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Tip 4: Eat Like a Child

No, I don’t mean eating sliced hot dogs and macaroni and cheese for every meal… not that those aren’t tasty at times! What I mean is learning to eat based on our bodies cues of hunger and satiety, which some of us refer to as intuitive eating (related to mindful eating, but not the same thing).

Here’s a (true) story for you:

Recently, Justin and I were invited over to our friends’ home for a Friday evening cookout with Justin’s classmates. As we sat outside on this mercifully cooler evening, sipping on Belgian beer and nibbling on delicious salmon dip and bruschetta, I noticed that my mind was somewhat preoccupied with what I was consuming (and not in a mindful, “oh this is so heavenly!” kind of way). I noticed, because I have gotten reasonably good at being cognizant of my own thoughts, that I was thinking about everything else I had eaten that day, the length of my run that morning, and the food that I knew was to come for the main course.

As I was observing my own internal dialogue, my attention was suddenly turned to our friends’ three-year-old, a spunky blonde boy who, I must point out, speaks three languages. But that’s beside the point. The point is that I noticed this little man eating chips like it was his job. And then he ate a cupcake. And then he started to eat a cookie, but put it down after about two bites. HE PUT IT DOWN!

Okay, so maybe I should explain what calls for the all-caps. I have a very hard time putting things down. And if the “thing” is a chocolate chip cookie. Well. God help me.

What amazed me about this little boy is that he was truly eating based on his hunger. He wasn’t eating based on how good or bad his day was at preschool. He wasn’t eating based on the amount of calories in his PB&J at lunch. He wasn’t eating because he worried what the hostess (granted, it was his mom) would think about his eating habits. He just ate.

Me, being childlike as... a child. I've clearly always been an emotional person.

Intuitive eating is all about just eating. Not eating just to eat, but eating based on the signals that our bodies so lovingly and wisely provide us. It’s about trusting our bodies to consistently provide those signals. And it’s about eating in a way that respects our bodies, as well as our minds and souls. Here’s a great primer from Christie at Honoring Health!

Trust your body? Yes, that’s quite a foreign idea to many of us. But it’s the foundation of intuitive eating. And it works! (Here’s some empirical evidence, for nerds like me!) But trusting your body means giving up the fight that you have had against your body. It means going back to that place before your mind (not brain, but mind) or culture or internalized messages took over control of what you put in your mouth. It means becoming a child again.

Perhaps the first step in the journey to eating like a child again is rejecting the “diet myth.” This is the myth that we begin to buy into at a certain age (for me I believe it was approximately seven) that our hunger has to be controlled by external means (e.g. counting calories and fat grams, taking pills and other substances to suppress appetite, etc.) It’s the myth that our bodies cannot be trusted and our hunger is dangerous. Children don’t think of hunger as dangerous. Hunger is simply hunger. It’s a need to which attention should be paid and then they can go about their business of playing in the sandbox.  So I am challenging you this week to be childlike in your experience of hunger.

Some questions to respond to below:

What does hunger feel like, when you really pay attention? What foods did you love as a child, the  ones you ate without considering anything but your desire for them?

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