7 surprising symptoms of orthorexia

By Tanja _ October 21, 2019

Are you obsessed about clean eating or eating healthily? Does your eating style interfere with your personal, social and work life? Does it even influence your physical and mental well-being?

Even though living a healthy lifestyle is highly recommended, you might have gone too far with your desire to be healthy. You might have developed symptoms that are associated with orthorexia, an eating condition characterised by a fixation on eating “purely” and healthily.

The word “orthorexia” was first coined by Dr Steven Bratman orthorexia in 1997. The term comes from the Greek words ὀρθός(correct) and ὄρεξις (appetite) and means literally “correct appetite”.

Despite having many similarities to anorexia and bulimia and being as clinically significant as other eating disorders, orthorexia is not recognised yet as an eating disorder in the Diagnostic and Statistical Manual of Mental Disorders or the American Psychiatry Association. This means that if you go to a doctor, they might bring up the term orthorexia, but they wouldn’t officially diagnose you with it.

Unlike in the case of anorexia or bulimia, people with orthorexia are not motivated to become thin. Instead, orthorexic people are driven by the urge to become healthy, clean and pure.

But how do you know if your healthy lifestyle has turned into orthorexia?

I would like to share with you seven surprising symptoms of orthorexia, to help you identify if you are affected by orthorexia or are likely to develop it.

1. You are obsessed with food quality

Your initial intention might have been to give your body and your mind the best and healthiest food possible rather than to achieve an ideal weight. However, with the passing of time, you have become more and more obsessed about food quality and seeking particular ingredients that give you a feeling of purity and health. “Clean eating” or “eating healthily” now forms the focus of your worldview and you spend a significant amount of time thinking about it. This might include excessively checking labels, researching the newest health trends or planning and preparing your meals.

2. You have strict food rules that affect your mood

Over time you have become very strict with your choice of food, avoiding any food that you see as unhealthy or impure. These patterns or rules have a big impact on how you feel. You experience extreme guilt, fear, distress, shame or even depression if you need to break these rules for whatever reason. These emotions might come from your belief that eating unhealthy food will harm your health. However, you feel very happy when it appears to you that your rules and rituals have achieved your desired results. To maximise these positive feelings, you develop more detailed and stricter food rituals. As a result, you feel trapped in a vicious cycle of emotions.

3. You eliminate specific foods

To achieve your ambitious goal of being as healthy as possible, you cut out more and more foods and even whole food groups, such as animal products, sugar, processed food, gluten and carbohydrates. As this develops further, you end up following a restricted diet that contains only a very limited number of “safe foods”. By missing out on essential nutrients, you might end up being severely malnourished.

4. You are constantly scared of becoming sick

Alongside your obsession with eating healthily, you develop an obsessive fear of sickness and disease. Following a strict diet and cutting out food that you don’t consider “clean” leads you to feel that you are in control of your health. However, occasionally eating food that you consider “unclean” you makes you feel ill or even as if you have been poisoned.

5. You experience a change in your social relationships

You avoid situations where you can’t control how food is prepared and what ingredients are used. In particular, being around certain “forbidden” foods scares you so much that you would rather stay at home so that have complete control over meal preparation. This means that eating out with friends and family dinners become things of the past.

6. You judge others on their eating style

As you become more focused on being as “pure” as possible, you start to judge your family or friends on their eating habits and lifestyles. To varying degrees, you regard them as “impure” or unhealthy. These judgements help you to feel better than others and encourage you to stay on track with your clean and healthy lifestyle.

7. You lack energy

After following a restricted diet for some time, you start to experience weakness, tiredness, loss of weight and lack of concentration. You might also take more time to recover from illnesses. Instead of achieving greater health, your strict diet and the lack of nutrients have caused a state of imbalance and malnutrition.

If any of these symptoms of orthorexia sound familiar to you, you don’t need to struggle alone. You can learn to break out of your strict eating cycle, develop a positive relationship with food and your body and regain control over your eating and your life.

Simply get in touch to discuss how I can help you.

It is entirely possible to overcome orthorexia – others have done it and so can you!

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