According to doctors, the attitude to your diet should be balanced and rational. The desire at all costs to eat exclusively correctly, only with ideal, absolutely healthy foods and strictly according to the canons of dietology is also not the norm, especially if the problem of one’s own diet occupies all a person’s thoughts. As Yekaterina Stetsenko, a dietitian at the CMD Center for Molecular Diagnostics of the Central Research Institute of Epidemiology of Rospotrebnadzor, Ekaterina Stetsenko, told Doctor Peter, such an obsession with healthy eating belongs to eating disorders and has recently been singled out as a separate disease – orthorexia.
Despite the fact that the signs of this problem were still at the end of the 18th century, for a long time orthorexia was not recognized as a serious pathology and was not even named in any way. It was classified as a psychosomatic spectrum disorder only in the second half of the last century. Today, in the digital age, the popularity of healthy lifestyle has increased more than ever.
Orthorexia can be defined by three main features: an obsessive or pathological passion for healthy eating; emotional consequences (stress, anxiety) in case of non-compliance with voluntary restrictions and dietary rules; psychosocial impairment in critical areas of life; and malnutrition and weight loss.
A distinctive feature of this behavior – the desire to adhere to a strict diet, allows people prone to orthorexia to feel more perfect, clean and healthy. Such a way of life causes a feeling of one’s own moral superiority over others due to selectivity and “correctness”, which leads to a further deepening of the disorder and a deterioration in the psychological state.
According to the expert, when faced with the rejection of their beliefs by others, people with this disorder avoid expressing these views and retire, isolate themselves from critics. Subsequently, this leads to social isolation. They develop a sense of guilt, hatred for others and for themselves.
Source: Rosbalt
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