‘What are you looking at?’ My co-worker stands behind me, can of Coke in hand, looking in confusion at my computer screen. I’ve got twenty Firefox tabs open, and all of them are of pictures of fried chicken. Welcome to day three of my juice fast.
It all started with such great intentions – I wanted a quick, sure-fire way to detox and lose weight. What could be more obviously effective than subsisting entirely on two litres of juice for five days? Plus it was billed as being good for me. And it was something that Gwyneth Paltrow - and all those other infuritably my-body-is-my-temple types were doing.
I’m not alone in my quest for a healthier lifestyle. We’ve all got that one mate who’s cut dairy, gluten, caffeine or carbs out of their diet. I once met someone who only ate raw fruit and veg – dehydrated kale crisps were as close as she got to cooked food.
For many, these choices are positive steps towards cutting out unhealthy crap like trans fats or artificial sugar. But some people’s fixation on healthy eating can tip over into full-blown compulsion. According to experts, one in 10 women and one in 20 men now suffer from orthorexia nervosa, a new disorder in which sufferers become dangerously obsessed with healthy eating – and their numbers are growing.
'It’s a very new phenomenon that is just beginning to be recognised,' says Azmina Govindji, a dietician and spokesperson for the British Dietetic Association. 'You can detect orthorexia in its extreme behaviour: you might start to notice sufferers taking health to an extreme, counting calories, becoming super active and refusing to eat processed food. They don’t even go out, because they’ll analyse everything they eat: ‘Will there be fruit and veg? Is it processed? Who’s cooked it? Will I be able to exercise it off?''
Unlike anorexia or bulimia, orthorexics don’t set out with the intention of losing weight. Instead they're blinded by the belief they’ve embarked on a better lifestyle, but end up shedding the pounds, sometimes to the point of malnutrition.
If this is all beginning to sound a bit like #firstworldproblems ('The green juice I bought from Whole Foods doesn’t have locally-sourced organic kale in it! I’m having a panic attack!' type tweets) bear with me. Because I've experienced first hand what can happen when the anxiety of keeping food ‘healthy’ becomes an intolerable stress. When eating what’s good for you becomes an all-consuming obsession.
I was gurning like a raver at the end of a 48-hour bender; it was like my mouth missed the sensation of chewing.
Take my juice fast, which promised that my body would cleanse itself and miraculously ‘reboot’ into desiring carrots over kebabs and chips. Four days in, I felt weak and irritable almost constantly. I was also gurning like a raver at the end of a 48-hour bender; it was like my mouth missed the sensation of chewing.
In the middle of the night, I gave in and devoured a biscuit. As soon as I swallowed, I felt devastatingly remorseful, like I’d spat in church or insulted my best friend’s mum.
'These diets can make you over-obsessed with a particular nutrient, say carbs or wheat, and that doesn’t help you have a healthy relationship with food. You’re more likely to have an unbalanced diet,' Govindji warns. 'Your liver, skin and gut are great detoxifying organs already. In fact, it could be potentially harmful to go for something extreme in the hope it’ll detox you.'
I felt guilty all night. Wasn’t I just being a baby? Why couldn’t I be healthy and do what was good for me? And then it hit me: torturing myself by viewing food as a source of guilt and not pleasure wasn’t good for me at all. I came off my juice fast the next day and bought a KFC bucket. Because seriously? God didn’t give us tastebuds just so we could chew kale all day.
Follow Zing on Twitter @misszing
This article originally appeared on The Debrief.