Teh One Who Knocks
09-16-2014, 11:27 AM
By Martha Ross - Contra Costa (Calif.) Times
http://i.imgur.com/2eL83IS.jpg
CONTRA COSTA, Calif. | During a recent trip to the Half Moon Bay, Calif., farmers market, Johnny Righini didn’t suffer a panic attack or chastise his mother when she bought nonorganic produce. For Righini, this moment of selfrestraint marked another small victory in his struggle to overcome a pathological obsession with eating “pure” foods.
Starting in his early 20s, Righini dedicated himself to vegan and raw food diets, thinking they offered a healthy way to recover from years of anorexia and bulimia. But he took those restrictive diets to extremes, agonizing, for example, over fruits and vegetables losing their “life force” each minute after being picked.
He now says his “twisted thinking” was a symptom of orthorexia, an eating disorder that is increasingly on the radar of health professionals.
Righini didn’t obsess over calorie counts, as he did with anorexia. He pored over ingredient labels — then rejected food with labels as being too “impure.” He found it impossible to eat out at restaurants or other people’s homes or to be around people eating fast food. He even tossed out food his mother brought home from a supermarket.
“Just as I restricted myself from food, I restricted myself from people,” he said. “If they were eating something my orthorexic mind didn’t approve of, I would get physical shakes and panic attacks.”
Eating disorder experts say there is nothing wrong with wanting to eat nutritiously or to eliminate certain foods. But healthy eating becomes harmful when people’s thinking or behavior becomes so “extremely rigid” they jeopardize their physical and mental health and relationships with other people, said Jennifer Lombardi, executive director of the Eating Recovery Center in Sacramento.
“Any diet or dietary restriction that causes a person to be unable to celebrate and socialize with food comfortably is going too far,” agreed Leah Hopkins, a clinical dietitian at the Monarch Cove Eating Disorder Treatment Center in Pacific Grove, Calif.
It’s not surprising that people fervently latch onto health food trends, especially here in Northern California, where a foodie culture equates wholesome eating with a happy life and disparages ingredients that are not organic, natural or locally produced.
“Some of my colleagues call it the ‘Whole Foods syndrome,’ ” says Katie Bell, medical director and psychiatric nurse practitioner at the Healthy Teen Project in Los Gatos, Calif. She added that an initial choice to cut out sugar, processed foods or other oft-labeled “bad” foods wins orthorexics praise from others who admire their self-discipline and slimming figures.
Orthorexia became a hot social media topic this spring when Jordan Younger, the Blonde Vegan blogger, startled her 70,000 Instagram followers with news that she had the eating disorder. She said she cut out options that even fell under the vegan umbrella because they were “not 100 percent clean or 100 percent raw,” she told People magazine. “I was following thousands of rules in my head that were making me sick.”
Orthorexia, unlike the more well-studied disorders of anorexia and bulimia, has not made its way into the Diagnostic and Statistical Manual of Mental Disorders, Fifth Edition, the universal authority for psychiatric diagnoses.
The working definition comes from San Francisco physician Steven Bratman. In a 1997 Yoga Journal essay and subsequent book, “Health Food Junkies,” he recounted his “health food addiction,” which he called orthorexia, using the Greek work “ortho” meaning “straight, correct or true.”
Experts say orthorexia becomes life-threatening when people’s food restrictions make it impossible for them to take in enough calories and nutrients to maintain good health. Bell recently treated a 14-year-old girl who ate only raw fruits and vegetables. She dropped to 80 pounds and had to be hospitalized for an irregular heartbeat.
http://i.imgur.com/2eL83IS.jpg
CONTRA COSTA, Calif. | During a recent trip to the Half Moon Bay, Calif., farmers market, Johnny Righini didn’t suffer a panic attack or chastise his mother when she bought nonorganic produce. For Righini, this moment of selfrestraint marked another small victory in his struggle to overcome a pathological obsession with eating “pure” foods.
Starting in his early 20s, Righini dedicated himself to vegan and raw food diets, thinking they offered a healthy way to recover from years of anorexia and bulimia. But he took those restrictive diets to extremes, agonizing, for example, over fruits and vegetables losing their “life force” each minute after being picked.
He now says his “twisted thinking” was a symptom of orthorexia, an eating disorder that is increasingly on the radar of health professionals.
Righini didn’t obsess over calorie counts, as he did with anorexia. He pored over ingredient labels — then rejected food with labels as being too “impure.” He found it impossible to eat out at restaurants or other people’s homes or to be around people eating fast food. He even tossed out food his mother brought home from a supermarket.
“Just as I restricted myself from food, I restricted myself from people,” he said. “If they were eating something my orthorexic mind didn’t approve of, I would get physical shakes and panic attacks.”
Eating disorder experts say there is nothing wrong with wanting to eat nutritiously or to eliminate certain foods. But healthy eating becomes harmful when people’s thinking or behavior becomes so “extremely rigid” they jeopardize their physical and mental health and relationships with other people, said Jennifer Lombardi, executive director of the Eating Recovery Center in Sacramento.
“Any diet or dietary restriction that causes a person to be unable to celebrate and socialize with food comfortably is going too far,” agreed Leah Hopkins, a clinical dietitian at the Monarch Cove Eating Disorder Treatment Center in Pacific Grove, Calif.
It’s not surprising that people fervently latch onto health food trends, especially here in Northern California, where a foodie culture equates wholesome eating with a happy life and disparages ingredients that are not organic, natural or locally produced.
“Some of my colleagues call it the ‘Whole Foods syndrome,’ ” says Katie Bell, medical director and psychiatric nurse practitioner at the Healthy Teen Project in Los Gatos, Calif. She added that an initial choice to cut out sugar, processed foods or other oft-labeled “bad” foods wins orthorexics praise from others who admire their self-discipline and slimming figures.
Orthorexia became a hot social media topic this spring when Jordan Younger, the Blonde Vegan blogger, startled her 70,000 Instagram followers with news that she had the eating disorder. She said she cut out options that even fell under the vegan umbrella because they were “not 100 percent clean or 100 percent raw,” she told People magazine. “I was following thousands of rules in my head that were making me sick.”
Orthorexia, unlike the more well-studied disorders of anorexia and bulimia, has not made its way into the Diagnostic and Statistical Manual of Mental Disorders, Fifth Edition, the universal authority for psychiatric diagnoses.
The working definition comes from San Francisco physician Steven Bratman. In a 1997 Yoga Journal essay and subsequent book, “Health Food Junkies,” he recounted his “health food addiction,” which he called orthorexia, using the Greek work “ortho” meaning “straight, correct or true.”
Experts say orthorexia becomes life-threatening when people’s food restrictions make it impossible for them to take in enough calories and nutrients to maintain good health. Bell recently treated a 14-year-old girl who ate only raw fruits and vegetables. She dropped to 80 pounds and had to be hospitalized for an irregular heartbeat.