Photographer Laurie Toby Edison posted this very quiet rebel yell against orthorexia on her blog.
Orthorexia, coined by Dr. Steven Bratman, is basically an obsession with eating right. Nutrition and/or morality guide your food choices rather than pleasure and satisfaction. Either that or, and we'll get to this, sufferers claim that they get pleasure and satisfaction from eating steamed macrobiotic tofu wheatgrass loaf with brewer's yeast and a side of raw spinach. Yes, they will claim, that is ever so much better than a plate of pot roast and mashed potatoes smothered in gravy, because once you start giving your body what's really good for it, your tastes change. They're proud of it, too. Check out this article in which a health food junkie happily claims the orthorexic label.
Examples of dietary philosophies which could trigger orthorexia would be veganism, raw foodism, fruitarianism, macrobiotics, calorie restriction with optimal nutrition, and, as with the article-writer above, a garden-variety preoccupation with health food. I.e. the person who will not contemplate eating Kraft macaroni and cheese because the cheese is processed and there are dyes in it and the macaroni is made from white flour obtained from wheat grown with pesticides.
Dr. Bratman is here to tell us that all this is just plain wrong. It's distorting, it's no fun, and, in one of the great ironies, it's unhealthy.
I don't need much convincing on that score. For reasons I don't understand, I go through periods when I don't eat as much as I am capable of at other times, but I can tell you that every bite I do consume is for pleasure. Baked potatoes with sour cream, penne marsala, burgers and fries and chocolate shakes, fresh glistening red grapefruit, cheesy omelets, oh hell yeah. I have never eaten anything for any purpose higher than my own delight. And I never will.
(I should add--I was indeed a vegetarian for eight years. Eight years that I spent eating spinach empanadas, mushroom stroganoff, pizza, fried rice, chocolate-chip cookies, brownies, Snickers bars, pancakes, and ice cream sundaes.)
Orthorexia is the enemy of all this. A slice of pizza could never pass the nutritional or moral audition that your average orthorexic or orthorexically-inclined person would put it through. To say nothing of a chocolate chip cookie.
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When I was fourteen or fifteen, I was not doing very well at all. My parents took me to a naturopathic doctor who gave me a blood test for food allergies. It was determined that I was allergic to yeast, dairy, corn, and sugar--in short, everything. I was forbidden all these foods and their offshoots for twelve weeks. No bread, no milk, no cheese, no tortilla chips, no cereal, no this, no that, no the other thing.
I'd just like to point out that I was under a hundred pounds at this point. If I stood with my feet together, you could have driven a truck through the gap between my thighs. Surely common sense would suggest that this was not the moment to restrict what such a girl might eat. But my parents were deranged enough with worry that they were prepared to believe that this temporary purge might somehow lead to subsequent attainment of Leni Riefenstahl-esque vigor. So we boldly forged ahead.
And it's not necessarily that dumb an idea--kind of like rebooting the computer.
So for twelve weeks I lived on soy muffins. I actually have happy memories of laughing in the kitchen with my mother as we baked them.
All this is by way of saying that the ortho-minded people (whether 'disordered' or not) are right about one thing: your tastes do change. After twelve weeks, I went and got an ice cream cone, and I didn't like it. I could smell the sugar wafting off it (an oddly jarring note), the sensation of my tongue sinking into the melty softness repelled me, and the taste did not compile. "What the hell is this," said my brain. "I don't want this. I want my soy muffins. Now there's flavor." (All too true.)
So all those people who claim that they genuinely prefer snap peas to brownies are not lying. This really does happen.
The question is, what do we do about it.
Me, I remembered that I used to love ice cream more than life itself. I wanted that pleasure back. So I littered the nation with pecked-at bowls of frosty until my tastes returned.
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My relationship to pleasure is complicated. That's why things like anorexia, orthorexia, size acceptance, and sex-positive culture matter to me. Fighting to regain my taste for ice cream mattered to me.
See, here's the thing about those twelve weeks: I never cheated. Not once. In fact, I never even considered cheating. If I couldn't face whatever soy-oriented shit there was to eat, I just didn't eat.
This is not like most people. Most people would sneak at least a couple of Tootsie rolls. Reality would burst through the strictures of the regimen.
For me, the regimen was reality.
That's dangerous.
I carry an Inspector Javert inside me. I carry a calorie-counter, a restricter, an orthorexic, an anorexic. A puritan. Fortunately she's internalized--she wants to impose her strictures only on herself, not on anyone else--but she's still got teeth. You have no idea how many battles she's won in my life. Just to take one, I tried, I really tried, to start drinking. I couldn't. Her fear of it was too strong. I was a reverse alcoholic: I could not control my impulse not to drink. I would resolve to have a beer on Friday night and then forget. When I did remember, I would drink down to where the neck widened and then pour it out. I have since given up. Sobriety won. And there is no recovery movement for my kind. ("Hi, my name is Savannah, and I'm a sobraholic...")
Hostess cupcakes are good for you.
