The orthorexia is an eating behavior disorder that involves obsession with healthy food . People suffering from this pathology are forced to follow a diet that excludes meat, fats, foods grown with pesticides or herbicides, and artificial substances that can harm the body. Orthorexia can lead to nutritional deficiencies and can even cause psychiatric illness .
“The ortho-toxic does not replace the foods that it rejects with others that can provide the same nutritional supplements. This translates into anemia , vitamin or trace element deficiencies, or lack of energy, ”explains Isabel Zamarrón, from the Nutrition Department of the Ramón y Cajal Hospital in Madrid.
The World Health Organization estimates that this eating disorder affects 28 percent of the population of western countries.
Causes
It usually manifests itself in people with obsessive-compulsive behaviors and genetically predisposed to it.
It has also been observed that many patients who have suffered anorexia nervosa , when recovering, choose to introduce only foods of natural origin , probiotic , grown ecologically, without fat or without artificial substances that may cause them harm , into their diet .
“Paradoxically, this behavior instead of avoiding the disease, comes to provoke it,” says the specialist.
Assess your symptoms
Symptoms
The main symptom that characterizes this disease is excessive concern about everything that is ingested.
Patients spend a large number of hours a day planning and preparing meals.
They are usually so strict that they even feel guilty when they fail to do so and are punished with even more rigid diets and fasts . In the same way, they completely eliminate certain foods in your diet, not only meats and fats, but also other substances such as sugar .
Unlike other eating disorders, orthotics are very open with their eating rules and don’t refrain from being proud of them in front of other people.
In the same way, they belittle those who do not follow dietary rules, so the patient may be doomed to social isolation .
Orthorexia nervosa often begins with healthy lifestyle habits that become obsessive and can lead to severe weight loss for patients. In addition, they can lose the ability to eat intuitively, that is, they stop knowing when they are hungry or when they are satiated.
Prevention
To avoid becoming obsessed with healthy eating, specialists recommend following these tips:
- Go for a healthy meal that includes the amount and varietyof foods that the body needs to function properly.
- It is important to focus on the educationof children through advice such as tolerance of oneself or others and educating based on models of beauty and non-stereotyped behavior .
Types
Currently, orthorexia is not classified into types.
Diagnosis
Because there is a fine line between healthy food and obsession with it, it must be remembered that the key to the diagnosis of any mental illness is that the disorder causes harm to the patient, both physically, socially, and emotionally.
To detect orthorexia, specialists have established a series of questions:
- Do you care more about the healthy characteristics of what you eat than about the pleasure of eating it?
- Do you spend more than three hours a day thinking about healthy food?
- Do you feel superior to other people who don’t eat like you?
- Does the quality of your life decrease as the quality of your diet has increased?
- Do you feel guilty if you skip your regimen?
Treatments
The treatment of people suffering from orthorexia must combine psychiatric therapy with pharmacological therapy , through medications that can incorporate the nutrients that are lacking into the diet .
The specialist usually advises the patient to resort to ” intuition ” again: he should eat when he is hungry and stop eating when he feels satisfied.
It is recommended that all the nutrients that were discarded be incorporated little by little and that, although continuing with a healthy diet, sufficient amounts of all foods are ingested.
Other data
Orthotics do not care about the quantity they eat, but rather about the quality of the food, since they affirm that a healthy diet taken to the extreme can cure all their illnesses.
Advanced orthorexia can pose a health hazard, primarily from causing hyponatremia (low sodium levels), metabolic acidosis (when the body produces too much acid or when the kidneys are not removing enough acid from the body), and pancytopenia (in which the patient has low levels of red blood cells, white blood cells and platelets).
