Ortho what?

I think we’re all familiar with two eating disorders, anorexia and bulimia, but there is a third one out there that we might want to be familiar with both literally and figuratively.  It’s called orthorexia, and it is an obsession with healthy eating.  People who suffer from this disease don’t focus on the amount of food they eat, but they fixate on the quality of that food, trying to ensure that they are eating the very healthiest of everything.  How can that be a bad thing?

 

Well.  It’s in the obsessive part.  Most of us manage, one way or another, to get our nutritional needs met.  On the whole, Americans have zero trouble getting enough calories or enough protein.  We get more than enough fat in our diets and more simple carbohydrates than our bodies know what to do with.  As I have said more than once, my two pieces of nutritional advice for almost everyone are to eat vegetables and drink water.  A reasonably varied diet that incorporates a balance of complex carbohydrates, lean proteins, and unsaturated fats is likely to have all the vitamins and minerals we need as well.  (If we’re worried or wouldn’t eat a fruit or vegetable except on pain of death, we might pop a multivitamin, but that’s just insurance.)  This does not mean that we can never eat cake or bacon or Grandma’s heart attack on a plate fettucine alfredo.  We just need to splurge occasionally and moderately.  No one died from eating one French fry (if they did, it must have been a poisoned one or an allergy or something.).

 

Anyway, my point is that we want to think enough about healthy eating but not too much.  We all know when we’ve eaten too much and we feel gross.  We all also know that those all kale all the time diets make us equally miserable.

 

That’s all the literal bit.  The figurative bit is this:  not everything we do all the time has to be useful.  Sometimes we can relax.  Sometimes we can play, and not just because play makes us more efficient later.  Real health comes from being fully human, engaging in the ebb and flow of life, enjoying the salad and the cake by turns, running around like crazy and then resting.  Let’s do what we need to do and let it go.