‘Orthorexia Nervosa’ – The unhealthy eating-healthy disorder

What is this healthy food obsession?

We all spend much of our fortune trying to have a good comfortable lifestyle and healthy living. But in today’s scenario, the definition of ‘being healthy’ is changing. Many of us have developed a nervous disease we aren’t even aware of ‘Orthorexia Nervosa’. It is a nervous disease wherein you keep a continuous check on the quality of food you are obsessed about the food you are eating.

You may begin the healthy food obsession to improve your health but over time your focus becomes extreme, and you cross the fine line of being healthy with an Orthorexic condition. According to research, this disease can affect people of any age but young women are the most susceptible.

Is this Obsession good for you?

We are in a world where we promote body positivity just for market strategies. The concept of being healthy these days is being slim. Slim is new healthy. We all have a common sense of what healthy is. Eating a balanced diet, home-cooked meals, and having a healthy routine is healthy.

We look up to the gram models, celebrities, and social media influencers for what they eat. There are new shows of these influencers where they talk about – “What I eat in a Day”. They get paid for every superfood they talk about and we spend hefty to buy those so claimed superfoods thinking we will get into the same shape as them.

Come out of these false advertisements and promises made. If you want to lose weight, lessen your calorific intake, and keep your body calorie deficient. You will lose weight. A dose of Exercise will build stamina and release good hormones which will keep you motivated.

Timeline of us switching to so-called healthy food obsession, quitting our traditional meals

We started off with cornflakes on the breakfast table replacing our traditional home-cooked breakfasts, then we went on to green tea which was even promised to preventing cancer. Green tea has antioxidants that boost your metabolism, but don’t count on drinking lots of green tea to lose weight or prevent you from any disease. Seriously if green tea would have prevented it, the cancer researchers would have been vacationing in Tuscany with a glass of wine. Then comes apple cider vinegar, quinoa seeds, chia seed, and what not seeds. Do you really think is this all helpful in the long run for you to be healthy? I was too in this trap but it’s high time to understand that not everyone requires these foods.

I am sure you must have heard gluten-free quite a lot these days; earlier even I tried to escape chapatis at home giving my mother a reason it has got gluten which is not good for health.

Back then I too was obsessed with eating healthy only; skipping the exercise part. I know how easy it is to buy stuff following your influencers and saying I have chosen a healthy diet and a lifestyle. But do you actually know what gluten is; not everyone has celiac disease which is an autoimmune disorder in the small intestines caused due to antibodies released against your own cells.

Replacing milk with soy milk or almond milk is considered the new healthy. Likewise, replacing white variants with brown ones like brown bread, brown rice, brown sugar. White ones are more refined than brown ones. Brown ones are whole grains with brans. Earlier the marketing strategies of the companies guided us to have refined food because it is easy to digest. And now, it tells us to prefer the brown variants as it will help you lose weight because they keep you full or longer times. We are just running in circles.

What the heck? At one time, Coca-Cola even promoted the idea of how exercise will help you lose weight more than any ill-effects of consumption of the sugary carbonated beverage. So, per their logic, drink cola and exercise to lose weight. Scratching your head already?

In the End

The reality is – Self-doubt is making us all run behind these so-called “Healthy Foods”. There isn’t anything wrong with our traditional foods and diets. The marketing departments are falsely portraying that we need to change to these superfoods so that they can sell us more of them. They will cite research, done on their money, on a very small group of people with, nobody knows, what methodology. And then say magical numbers like 80% 90% people getting benefitted. See-through their charade. Question what you read and hear.

Don’t cut down on your home-cooked healthy food. Cut down on the self-doubt about yourselves.

Also read, Indian Cooking Tips

One Life. Live Boundless.