Picking and eating the right kind of food is very important these days, especially since there are a lot of artificial components being added to most of the food. Everyone wants to be healthy, and doing everything they can to achieve a fit lifestyle. But when can "healthy" eating become too much? Can some diet actually make us sicker?
Carrie Armstrong became obsessed with "clean" eating when she got sick a few years back. This obsession started with the intention of just being able to recover quickly from what she had. During that time, her doctors told her that medicine can only do so little for her.
She then took it upon herself and researched online about alternative natural remedies and body-boosting diets.
"I initially thought that I had gotten sick because of my poor eating habit for years," the 35-year-old sports presenter from London recalled. She then started to read about the life-changing effects of giving up some things in your diet. It first started with meat and sugar, then carbohydrates, and it went from there.
She expected to feel more alert and energetic, like what was promised on the health forum she had read. In her search for wellness, Armstrong decided to go vegan, then after a while switched her diet up to veganism, avoiding any animal-based food products and anything that had been cooked.
Over the course of 18 months, she has drop from 11 stone which equals to 70kg to 6 stone which is equivalent to 40kg. She also stopped menstruating, and became completely obsessed with detoxing and cleansing.
Armstrong's case is a textbook example of orthorexia nervosa. The term was created in 1997 when Dr. Steven Bratman wrote about his personal experience of evangelical eating; he wouldn't eat vegetables picked more than 15 minutes earlier and insisted on chewing the food in his mouth 50 times before swallowing. He defined this condition as a pathological fixation on eating proper food.
The condition is a bit that of obsessive-compulsive disorder and closely connected to anorexia nervosa. The only difference they have it that people with orthorexia are concerned of the quality of the food they eat rather than the quantity. The Diagnostic and Statistical Manual of Mental Disorder has not identified this condition as an eating disorder yet making it hard for experts to get the exact number of the rise in the number of cases in the recent years.
James Collins, a sport nutritionist said that it's never healthy to eliminate whole food groups to achieve the ideal weight. A diet that does so will lead to deficiencies.
It's great to be healthy but you should not go over your limits as well. Most health practitioners would agree with Oscar Wilde's wise words: "Everything in moderation, including moderation."
