Eating
The clean eating has taken over and you've stopped being able to eat with people and you can't tell whether it's discipline or disorder.
You read every label. You investigate every ingredient. You won’t eat at restaurants you can’t verify. You bring your own food to events. You feel pure when you eat what you’ve approved and contaminated when you don’t. The list of what’s acceptable keeps shrinking. People around you have noticed. You think they’re being judgmental. They’re worried.
Healthy eating is not a problem. The structure your healthy eating has become is a problem.
The rules keep multiplying.
Educational, not diagnostic. Not a substitute for clinical assessment.
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Orthorexia uses the language of health to install rules that have nothing to do with health and everything to do with control. The actual nutritional benefit of the rules has been declining as the rules have proliferated. The structure has its own logic, and the logic is purity rather than nutrition.
You very likely came up with a particular relationship to control or moral worth that taught you to apply both to your body. You may have grown up with parents who were rigid about food in some way, and you absorbed that food was a moral category rather than just nutrition. You may have lived through a stretch when other things were unmanageable and the food was the one thing you could systematize. You may have absorbed wellness culture as the framework for being acceptable, and you’ve been running its rules with increasing strictness ever since.
For the related patterns, see I restrict food or I have OCD . For the broader framework, see I have an eating problem .
The rules were supposed to protect you. They’ve been narrowing your life.
Strategic therapy treats the rule system as the actual problem, with health as the cover story it has been using to install itself. We work on the rule-making process itself: which rules came in when, which feeling each rule was meant to manage, which violations would feel intolerable and why. Your relationship to food gets to widen because the apparatus that kept narrowing it stops being run.
You’ll eat at the restaurant without inspecting the menu like a tax form. Pure and contaminated stop being the categories.
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