What is Orthorexia and what part did it play in my ED?
Orthorexia is an eating disorder that is not commonly known amongst the general population. This condition affects people in terms of obsessive behaviours towards food, with the primary objective of being ‘healthy’. They will likely regard foods as ‘good’ or ‘bad’ and seek to consume only what they consider to be ‘pure’ foods. The tight rules and restrictions will likely affect a person socially and can be detrimental to both mental and physical health.
Truthfully, I wasn’t aware this diagnosis existed until more recently and believed my orthorexic obsessions around food went hand in hand with my anorexia nervosa. I had no idea that these symptoms were those of an eating disorder in their own right and could occur independently from all other eating disorders.
My battle with orthorexia had one of the most alarming and destructive effects on my mental health because it completely altered my perception of all food. What first began as me considering food as either ‘good’ or ‘bad’ escalated significantly, as I changed these categories to ‘clean’ and ‘dirty’. This, for me, proved far more powerful and detrimental to my nutritional choices and further limited the types of foods I was allowed to keep inside me and digest.
To me, categorising food as ‘clean’ and ‘dirty’ was very dangerous and had a profoundly negative effect on my mind, to the point that I wholeheartedly believed I was poisoning my body if I ate anything that I considered ‘dirty’. And, by ‘dirty’, I meant anything other than salad, vegetables, water, and acidic citrus fruits.
After every binge, I would experience an internal meltdown from the chronic fear that I had not purged everything I had eaten and had ingested some of the ‘dirty’ foods. I pictured the particles flowing through my veins, polluting my body from organs to extremities, like a mild hallucination.
It was my distorted mind that led me to imagine such vivid thoughts and feelings and again shows the disturbing power of eating disorders and how they can manipulate our brains. How can they force a savvy person to believe something so specific and extreme, with no evidence to back up the theory? It sends shivers down my spine to think I once believed its lies and allowed myself to be possessed by such a demonic disease. But it was not out of choice.
Not only did my orthorexia convince me I was physically poisoning my body, but its negative impact on my thinking and subsequent mental fragility enabled it to force my mind to link food symbolically to my person, which proved to be one of the most twisted and toxic traits of the disorder. It also wreaked havoc when mixed with my binge–purge behaviours and sent me into a spiral of despair.
This spiral was the result of me binging on foods I considered ‘bad’ and ‘dirty’, where I started to symbolically attribute my feelings of being a bad person to what I ate, turning my distorted self-perception into something tangible. When I purged, I felt like I was removing the badness from within, in both a physical and metaphorical sense. I can now see this belief was completely invalid, pointless, and destructive — exactly what my eating disorder was.
It felt so real, but that was the influence my eating disorder had over my being and what made it so hard to fight. I was effectively fighting against myself, but the stronger I became, the more I was able to see reality and that my eating disorder was not me, but a vicious, relentless imposter with one sole aim: to take over my soul and dissolve me to nothing, both physically and mentally.
Thank goodness I finally had the strength and willpower to completely turn the situation on its head and reverse roles. I now have the upper hand and power to relentlessly impose on ‘it’, where all eating disorders will remain a ‘nothing’ to me for the rest of my life.
Please refer to the video above to learn more about my experience of Orthorexia, and how I was able to challenge the thoughts to move forward with my life in recovery
