Orthorexia Nervosa

For my masters project at Columbia I wrote about the eating disorder orthorexia nervosa, the unhealthy obsession with healthy eating. It was published this week on Health.com.

Naturally I spent a lot of time editing this story while eating Oreo cookie cake at the Cake Shop in the Lower East Side.

An excerpt:

Alena’s obsession with healthy eating started in 12th grade, when she found out she had Candida (a type of yeast infection) and a homeopathic doctor asked her to stop eating yeast, wheat, sugar, and dairy for several weeks as part of her treatment. She was already a vegetarian, so she mainly ate rice and vegetables. (Alena did not want her last name published.) Then, when she was 19, she went to a naturopathic doctor with a collection of stomach symptoms, including nausea, constipation, and indigestion, and was again instructed to avoid processed grains, sugar, soy, dairy, and nuts. “And that’s when I went crazy,” says Alena, now a 22-year-old student at NYU. “I basically cut out everything from my diet. I convinced my mind that food made me sick.”

Alena still goes through bouts where she swears off those food groups, and her forbidden list now includes carbohydrates, beans, tropical fruit, sugar, farmed fish, and potatoes that aren’t from her own garden. Meat, nonlocal produce (such as bananas), juice, beer, and dairy are all “evil,” she says. “What I do eat are a lot of vegetables. I have to have vegetables in every meal or I feel sick,” she says. “I eat whole grains like barley, whole-grain kasha. Not rice, because it really hurts my stomach and for political reasons, because it is shipped from too far away. I eat seasonal fruits, fish, and eggs.”

Read the full story here.

PS The photo of the broccoli quinoa salad is from the blog 101 Cookbooks. One of my sources told me she loves this blog. I made a few of the recipes from it and found that I love it too.

PPS The image of the cake is from the blog My Baking Addiction. I’ve never made it, but I definitely should.