Beware of Orthorexia
All of us understand the pressure of living a healthy lifestyle. For a long time, many of us have learned to become more dependent in what we called “ready made diet menu” of some well known resto and diet gurus. Some people can no longer cook up a good healthy dinner for friends as we have a varying set of ‘healthy diners’ who are very choosy on what they will eat and are unyielding that it must be what they observe as healthy.
So how do we define what exactly is healthy in terms of the food we eat? Can a diet consisting of purely vegetables really be healthy? What ever happened to eating a well balanced meals and living by the saying: ‘being moderate in everything does you good’? This excessive and compulsive ‘healthy eating is now so common in our society, that it has given mount to a new eating disorder known as Orthorexia.
According to Bratman, Orthorexia is an excessive or too much (compulsive) requirements to eat healthy food, but to such a degree that a person become riskily thin, unhealthy and gravely at risk of ending his life. Again, Bratman established a two diagnostic questions that can at least determine that a person is becoming Ortherexic. The first is: “Do you care more about the virtue of what you eat than the pleasure you receive from eating it?” The second is: “Does your diet socially isolate you?” To these, the doctor is not talking about occasional eating of healthy foods. What he is trying to say is that--Orthorexic person do not think they look fat nor have a desire to look thin, they’re just excessive and compulsive about their need to eat what they consider as healthy foods without considering the consequences of unbalance diet.
To avoid becoming Orthorexic, we should:
1. Eat healthy food in moderation
2. Avoid too much restriction on “what to eat or not to eat type of thinking”
3. Consider your doctor’s advice before going to some sort of dieting to level down your excess weights or vice versa when you want to add extra weights.
4. Lastly, maybe it will help. Better think of other things to do, rather than pampering your appetites all the time. (Do not always worry about what you will eat or drink) “We eat to live or we live to eat”. Remember folks: life is more important than food.
—cheers.
