Re: eating healthy- is it a vice?-Orthorexia

Perhaps obsessive people approach healthy eating obsessively. I used to work with a chap who'd snort coke all weekend, drink himself silly, then come to work and prepare and eat the best organic food. It seemed to me that he was hiding his pain both in his addictive behaviour and his orthorexia.

Howit.

Here's some info if you're interested. Not that I'm saying you have orthorexia! I'm new to this forum and I don't know you, so please don't think I'm telling you that you've got a problem. This is in answer to what your co-workers were talking about.


http://www.healthyplace.com/Communities/Eating_Disorders/type_orthorexia.asp

"The whole issue is obsession," says Steven Bratman, MD, who in 1997 coined the word orthorexia from the Greek ortho, meaning straight and correct. "This is about the obsession with eating to improve your health."

Bratman is author of Health Food Junkies: Orthorexia: Overcoming the Obsession with Healthful Eating, released in 2001. He went through his own bout with the disorder while living in a commune in the '70s. He then moved on to medical school at the University of California-Davis and practiced for 13 years as an alternative medicine physician in California. He is author of two other books -- Alternative Medicine Sourcebook and The Natural Pharmacist -- and is medical director of The Natural Pharmacist, an alternative medicine information web site.

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The obsession doesn't necessarily lie just between the mouth and the other end. An out-of-control healthy eater feels a sense of spirituality, he says. "You're doing a good, virtuous thing. You also feel that because it's difficult to do, it must be virtuous. The more extreme you are, the more virtuous you feel," Bratman says.