Sure, technically speaking its not an actual disorder, but orthorexia, defined as an unheatlhy obsession with healthy eating, is in fact a real and recognizable thing. The day I discovered I had this disorder was a monumental one in my own life. Truth be told, it wasn’t just “a problem,” it was actively destroying me.
And yes, there is irony in that. But there was also a point of revelation for me personally that shifted how I see this world and the questions i am asking about what this world is today, a revelation that emerged from this awarness that an obsession rooted in healthy eating was the thing that was killing me.
Seems that every few years I come back to this topic. A testament to the subjects enduring power in culture at large, as well as the ongoing struggle of dealing with it on a personal level. Part of why it came to mind over these past few weeks is because of a recent reflection I penned in this space on Kahtryn Morton’s The Story of Your Life: How Social Media Shapes the Way We Experience Everything. The disorder existed before social media emerged as the force it is today, but it’s take over of the way we do life significantly elevated the problem to a whole other level. That and, through social media, I was posed the question by someone upon recently turning 50, do you have goals for health and fitness. Someones who’s own public obsession draws itself from worldviews and narratives that I have come to see as largely problematic and incoherent.
I have told this story a few times before in this space, but to tell it again here:
Orthorexia is of course a disorder rooted in something other than food related issues, but it is a particular food related manifestation of those underlying issues. This is something I can trace back to my dad’s initial cancer diagnosis when I was between 10 and 12 years old. Two images come to mind of this phase in our lives. First, the image of my dad lying on our sofa taking his “natural” medicine (which were needle injections of a then unknown substance, paired with the oral consumption of a then equally strange substance in small vials… I’ll refrain from naming what these were so as not to mislead anyone). At the time, I had no idea what the word natural meant, and I had no idea of its significance when it comes to the different decisions people make around proposed treatments. But that was the moment when the word became commonplace in my life, and indeed came to hold power over my life.
The second image is of our kitchen. It wasn’t just a gradual change, it was a change that happened overnight. One day the familiar foods and routine snacks and meals were there, the next day they were not, replaced by a complete overhaul and pivot in our daily diet. Ya, I was young, and of course I complained. I was told these were “healthy” and therefore “good” foods, and from that point on every time I would visit (or they would visit) my extended family in the GTA I became known for my incessant complaining about this “healthy” food.
Nonetheless, this became the norm, and thus it became ingrained in my psyche and my consciosness in ways I then still did not understand.
Fast forward through my dad’s remission and consecutive reemergence of the same cancer, and I am now standing on the precipice of finally moving out of my parents house and home at 27 years of age. This is where years of this unconscious rhetoric and patterns and diet really showed its face, presenting me with a very real point of crisis. I can still remember my first time roaming those grocery aisles and suddenly being faced with a dilemma. In front of me were two packages of lettuce. One said organic, the other did not. The organic ones, of course, cost $2 more than the regular package. So what do I do? All these years of being taught that this “organic” lettuce was somehow important come rushing back in on this moment, and I realized that I didn’t actually know why it was important. What I knew was, I needed to make a decision. And that’s when I went home and started down the endless rabbit hole of researching the relationship between the foods we eat and our health.
When I say research, I mean an all out obsession. Next thing I know my wall, and pretty much every last inch of storage space I could find, was filled with articles and notes and information on everything from food to environmental sources to activities (or lack of them). I could tell you about every food and every link with every disease on the level of becoming a walking, talking encyclopedia fot this simple fact: everything is killing us (and that’s not hyperbolic). And the more I consumed, the greater the feedback loop became.
And yet, at this point I still didn’t recognize that I had a problem. I assumed that I was now officially part of this insiders club called the resistance, and my frequent visits to the “health food” store (and its very lucrative business) was the source of my new found superpower.
I didn’t know I had a problem until I got married, and suddenly it wasn’t just me browsing those supermarket aisles, but two of us. That’s when my obsession turned from an internal exercise to an external conflict. Forming these habitual exercises, such as intentionally tagging along behind my wife and quietly replacing the default options she would place in the cart with what I felt were the appropriate choices. And that’s one of the more tame examples of this now elevated point of crisis. I had turned our marriage into a never ending act of resistance, except that I was largely still acting entirely alone, and in my greatest moment of shame still unable to articulate precisely why what I was doing actually mattered or what I was actually looking to achieve.
It was around this time that social media was really starting to take off as the new driving force of our lives, and with that came a whole new level of research potential. Before I knew it, I was so far down this rabbit hole and so lost to my obsessions that I had actually driven myself to a physical breaking point. All of this information in my head coalesced in a literal week long bought of no sleep. When I say no sleep, I mean no sleep. My brain could not shut off. I spent every night moving to the couch, where nothing was working. Day 2. Day 3. Day 4. At this point I had exhausted every sleep aid source from the health food store I could find, at one point coming dangerously close to overdosing, and I ended up at a walk-in getting a prescribed sleep aid.
Which also didn’t work.
What eventually did work was a pill usually prescribed for epilespy. i was supposed to take two. I was leary about any prescribed medication and took a half of one. But that was all it took. In the middle of the afternoon, not long after taking that pill, I heard in my head what was (to me) an audible crack. As though lightning had struck me, it was that loud. And suddenly I was out.
It was in that moment that I recognized I had a problem. And not just a physical one (which was certainly there, from the eroded brain chemistry to the toll this obsession was taking on my internal organs), but a deeper rooted problem. I not only recognized the degree that my disorder was impacting my marriage, my relationships, my own life, but I began to seriously consider, and indeed know, how intertwined my assessment of these physical realities were with my underlying beliefs driving my actions.
All this research and I still hadn’t actually addressed the real question: why does it matter? What is this obsession actually trying to achieve and to what master narrative does it belong?
This began a slow process of reform. A process that started with purging my life of all this “information.” There was very little that I could do about the information already in my head, which to this day still acts as a trigger, but there was a helpful mantra I adopted to help me place a stop-gap between my continued absorption of these never ending articles, which was rooted in something I knew to have more truth than that data or information. The great irony of my obsession is that it is designed to feed itself. Every single study, every single theory, every single trend, fad, evidence based approach- and to be sure they are endless. All of them follow this same pattern: what we think is going to save our health today will be the very headlines that declare what’s killing us tomorrow.
I knew this to be true, because I had a room full of researched data proving this to be the case. In every single case, be it through the “science” overturning what we once thought was “helpful,” or through our present ignorance of the newly disovered “destructive” force or entity or food that we failed to attend to, I could find this same narrative by placing multiple articles side by side. That was the common narrative, and it was by laying all of this out in front of me that I had an evidenced way of battling back against the obsession.
That then freed me to do the hard work of attending for what it was that I actually believed. Of attending for what my obsession was trying to control, and to what end it’s efforts were seeking to achieve something I couldn’t even yet articulate. That became my new act of resistance in a social media age where the health trends were now the norm.
Now here is where I also need to be careful. This is my story. It’s not everyones story. Caught up in nearly every single endeavor to be healthy is also the very real fact that every regimine also brings about certain outcomes, be it related to weight loss, strength training, endurance. Full discolsure: in those years of actively destroying myself, I was also fluctuating between 135 and 140 pounds and could run a marathon without any needed training. I could (and did) easily bike or rollerblade the 16 km route (one way) to work as part of my regular routine.
Here’s the thing. I understand that every story arrives with its own set of important nuances. But there are three things I have come to believe are also routiinely true about the culture at large, a culture that is in fact saturated with programs and regimes, endless ideologies and a never ending barrage of “facts” relating to how we make ourselves healthy:
- there are a lot of people who have undiagnosed and largely normalized orthorexia in some form or fashion who don’t recognize what it is
- our culture is bad at asking the why questions surrounding our trends and regimes, and is even less adept at attending for what it is we actually believe
- the science that we root our certainty in today is the same science that will upend our control over our lives tomorrow
I admittedly have developed a necessary cynicism about the whole enterprise. But that cycnicism is not about overturning misinformation and contradictions in favor of the facts. My skepticism has more to do with how we define the aims of this enterprise in the first place. It’s rare that the point of our motivation is the problem. There is almost always a justifiable reason informing the why of our endeavors, and those are often rooted in real world issues, health and wellbeing related issues, that push us to respond. What’s also common though is the lack of clarity regarding the aim of our endeavors, our newly found habits. Here we can’t just sweep such questions under the rug of a largely undefined and ambiguous motivation to “make it to 100.” Again, this is my opinion, but where I hear that surface level assessment, I tend to immediately conclude that the real motivations are clearly lying underneath, and those motivations need the accountability of actual examined beliefs in order to be known and understood for what they are. This, in my experience, doesn’t happen because the mantra and the regimine itself so often become the virtue.
There is a learning I came to in my own journey towards attending for my battle with orthorexia. A battle that continues to this day. My family can tell you that I have left over trigger points. Things that I obsessively do or can’t do which are rooted in that head full of information that I will never be able to truly purge. I know I do them. But for as long as they remain tempered and contained, I have learned how to co-exist without it overtaking my life. The more difficult thing is navigating a world of honest to goodness emerging medical matters. I am probably the worst person who could get celiac disease, for example. Talk about a world defined by a life of endless obsession and control. Irionically, that disease is triggered or activated by extreme stress such as the events of my prolonged struggle with orthorexia.
My learning though. This comes from the honest to goodness aged lives I have encountered along my journey. What hit me one day was a particular study of those in their 100’s, regarding what their supposed “secret” was for their longevity. If this is the largely ambiguous and undefined aim assumed by the younger voices posing the question, the short answer is- there is no actual answer to that question. What there is however are articulated trends and patterns we can analyze within their responses. Like my own aged grandparernts, and the stories they told about their parents and grandparents before them, long before all of the modern inventions and conveniences and supplements and information overload and on and on were a thing, these were lives marked by unexpected realities. These were people who by and large valued a freshly baked loaf of bread with a knife full of melted butter and frseh jam. Who ate ice cream every night and handed you candies from the jar when you came for a visit. Whom enjoyed the value of a cherished walk instead of a run, a cup of coffee/tea and a good book. Whom lived in an age where what we deem today to be adverse weight was not frowned upon. Whom spent time doing the things we have now relegated to our machines, such as hand washing their clothes and keeping the furnace going and growing their gardens and walking to the post office to deliver hand written letters.
Which is to say, they spoke a different language, not inconsequentially born from an age where people did in fact die younger from viruses and diseases that had nothing to do with ones eating habits. When asked the qeustion about their longevity, their answers weren’t about what they did, but about defining a life in much different terms. The simple fact that they were 100 was simply an indication that they had survived the external forces “their” world was constantly throwing at them.
Here’s the truth I have come to know for myself. One of the reasons Orthorexia had so much power over my life is because it not only perpetuated underlying anxieties, it created them. In the terms of the world I had been handed, I did what I was supposed to do. I looked to the science, I got the facts, I used those facts to bring about a different and better wanted reality. I controlled my world on the level of such utility. And what I got in return were a freshly created package of anxieties and the rude awakening that science is not a set of facts but a process. I could run a marathon and bike that 16 kilometers to work, but there were a myriad of other ways my life was being eroded and and endless number of new information telling me I was going to die because I did or did not do A, B and C.
In such an endeavor, in such an approach, life becomes a matter of beating the odds, which then gets defined as an unarticulated goal of making it to 100, regardless of whether that narrative is actually coherent or rational. The difference however between the era of my grandparents and today is that, if we all occupy a world in which one can smoke packs a day and survive for 100 years while someone else can never pick up a cigareete and die at 20 (to use a crude example), it was far more important for them to attend for what they actually believed about this world and their lives than it was for them to be obsessed with controlling longevity. That, it turns out, was the secret.
We have reduced this world to information, to data points, to facts. A world that we can then control. If it was more common for someone in my grandparents time to die young at the hands of a virus or a plague that our modern vaccines have largely eradicated, the anxieties our changes have brought about today are rooted in that very perception of needed control. Thus, we find ourselves asking very different questions than our grandparents did when it comes to unpacking our answers.
This would be my own summation of my grandmother’s answer to this question: the secret? Find a better narrative that is asking better questions, one that seeks to know what this life truly is rather than getting all muddled up in chasing the headlines.
For me? It took a lot just to be able to learn how to enjoy that bowl of ice cream again. As my friends would say, to trade in the “potato ice cream” (yes, it’s a thing) for a good cream based concoction. It took a lot to throw away all those health products (and to not think about the vast amounts of money I spent feeding my addiction in the process). It took a lot to create barriers between myself and the endless world of health and wellness and fitness coaches vying for my attention and promising to hand me control over my world through the latest information about superfoods and balanced diets.
And please, forgive my cynycism towards that end if you are one. All I have to this end is my own story. And the truth is, I am far healthier today than I was when I could run a marathon. Just in a different way and in different terms,
The Stories of my Life 