Orthorexia

It's hard to give myself a break when the burden of my health always weighs so heavily on my mind. Even when I'm feeling pretty much okay, I could feel better, and I need to do everything in my power to avoid feeling worse. These are the thoughts that have driven me for the past few months. They have not been a pleasant few months.

In early May, I realized that my relationship with food was getting downright dangerous. I had this cycle going since just after getting diagnosed with Crohn's: eat super healthfully (whatever that meant to me at the time) for a couple months; go on a wild, uncontrollable binge-eating spree for a few days; plunge back into eating healthfully with renewed vigor. I knew this was not a healthy cycle. What I really wanted was to achieve that healthy eating ideal 100% of the time. (I wrote about this before, and you can read the shame I've felt for so long.)

That is also not healthy.

But, see, my mind latches onto health-related information and does not let it go even when the information and the advice it spawns are in direct conflict with other advice I've accepted as law. (There's a relevant little story that went around not too long ago that describes the phenomenon: "The Terrible Tragedy of the Healthy Eater.") And furthermore, I'm a perfectionist. If there's a way to "do it right," you'd better believe I will do whatever I possibly can to "do it right." I will drive myself to destruction to do it right.

Did you know I got straight A's for 11 consecutive years?
I'm not bragging. I now actually think it's a bad thing.
What's not a bad thing is that "SAVE FERRIS" pin. Good job, me.

My point is that, driven by both external information and obsessive perfectionist internal dialogue, what I ate when I was eating "healthy" gradually got whittled down to fewer and fewer choices. My palate was not satisfied, my food addictions were not quelled, I was constantly berating myself. It was evidence of a profound distrust of my body (having an autoimmune disease can do that), a complete lack of faith that it would tell me what was right for me, and a growing hatred of food.

Here's me in April again, before my first 5K. Do you wonder what "Clean 13" means?
It was a self-inflicted challenge to eat nothing but produce and 13 other "clean" food items
(dark chocolate, salmon, rice, etc.) for 13 straight weeks.
I made it about a month. The whole thing was a really, really bad idea.

It got to the point where I was thinking about food all day long, stewing in a cauldron of frustration and negativity, and yet I did not want to eat at all anymore. I've never gotten to the point where I actually did stop eating; instead, I binged ever more frequently on the aforementioned food addictions because they were the only food items that brought me any degree of pleasure. So I hated food, I gained weight, I was angry all the time. At that point I found a clinical nutritionist and therapist (all in one person! What luck!) and reached out to her. I wanted someone to help me sort through the mental issues and tell me what I should be eating.

That's not precisely what ended up happening.

To be continued...

But for now, the moral of the story is that extremes of any sort can be a form of abuse to your body. Good intentions can go awry.