I think there might be a tendency towards forms of orthorexia (which is not yet recognized formally as an eating disorder).
If you couple the extreme diets often pushed at autistic people (and at many disabled people in general), with our obsessive tendencies and picky eating, you could easily end up in a situation where someone is fanatical about staying on diets that are not actually necessary for us. Especially if instead of just being a picky eater someone found a food-fad type theory to explain the foods they are picky about.
I was orthorexic for some time. I am not now, and the only foods I avoid are ones that are actually medically necessary (such as foods that make me feel crappy from reflux or something). Despite not actually being orthorexic anymore, I still find it very easy to get stuck on a limited and unhealthy diet just by habit of eating the same thing over and over and over and over again. And I still have worries about foods, they're just milder than they were before.
The Orthorexia Home Page says that orthorexia is an eating disorder that is not about failure to eat, and not about binging and purging, but rather about an obsession with "proper" eating that becomes so intense that it takes over a person's life and interferes with other aspects of it. In severe forms a person can convince themselves that almost all foods are bad for them and starve to death, and at that point it resembles (and can be mistaken for) anorexia.
That homepage is written by the man who coined the term, who is a recovering orthorexic himself.
While I am not sure I like the medicalization of what's partially a social phenomenon, I find it a really useful concept in understanding how I used to feel (and occasionally catch myself feeling in a much milder way) about food. A lot of stuff about orthorexia focuses on fad diets that anyone can get into (extremes of fruitarianism, raw foodism, etc), but it can also happen to people who imagine themselves (or have been told) to be "reacting to" or "allergic to" lots and lots of foods, including people who have genuine health problems but every time they flare up they stop eating whatever they had been eating when it got worse, assuming that it was the food causing it, etc.
The man who coined the term said that at one point he had a patient who wanted to find a diet where she could manage her asthma without the medications she took for it. They identified a few foods to stop, but she just kept going and going. He describes what happened when she came back to his clinic:
Quote:
Recently, Andrea came in for a visit and described the present state of her life. Wherever she goes, she carries a supply of her own food. She doesn't go many places. Most of the time she stays at home and thinks carefully about what to eat next, because if she slips up, the consequences continue for weeks. The asthma doesn't come back, but she develops headaches, nausea, and strange moods. She must continuously exert her will against cravings for foods as seemingly innocent as tomatoes and bread.
She was pleased with her improvement and referred many patients to me. But I began to feel ill whenever I saw her name on my schedule. The first rule of medicine is "above all, do no harm." Had I really helped Andrea, or had I harmed her? If she had been cured of cancer or multiple sclerosis, the development of an obsession might not be too high a price to pay. But when we started treatment, all she had was asthma. If she took her four medications, she also had a life. Now all she has is a menu. She might have been better off if she had never heard of dietary medicine
He also talks about orthorexia in places like communes he was at, where people were trying out all sorts of vaguely religious theories about food and feeling holier-than-thou and "more spiritual" when they ate "better" than other people. And people who were so into "health food" that they became obsessed with eating and not with living.
Another website gives the following possible signs of orthorexia:
* Spending more than three hours a day thinking about healthy food
* Planning tomorrow's menu today
* Feeling virtuous about what they eat, but not enjoying it much
* Continually limiting the number of foods they eat
* Experiencing a reduced quality of life or social isolation (because their diet makes it difficult for them to eat anywhere but at home)
* Feeling critical of others who do not eat as well they do
* Skipping foods they once enjoyed in order to eat the "right" foods
* Feeling guilt or self-loathing when they stray from their diet
* Feeling in "total" control when they eat the correct diet
Quoting
another article:
Quote:
The obsession doesn't necessarily lie just between the mouth and the other end. An out-of-control healthy eater feels a sense of spirituality, he says. "You're doing a good, virtuous thing. You also feel that because it's difficult to do, it must be virtuous. The more extreme you are, the more virtuous you feel," Bratman says.
In his practice, Bratman tells WebMD, he has seen many patients with this condition. "I saw two or three people a day who would ask how they could be stricter in their eating."
Very often, Bratman says, the food preoccupation stems from a problem like asthma. "Among those who believe in natural medicine, the progressive view is to avoid medicine, which supposedly has side effects, and instead focus on what you eat. But everyone misses the fact that if you get obsessed with what you eat, it actually has a lot of side effects -- mainly, the obsession itself."
I never felt better than people who didn't eat like I did, but I definitely felt like I was doing something good (beyond usual good) by eating a certain way, so I sort of know what they mean there. And that's a pretty deluded way to feel considering all the problems in the world that eating that way doesn't solve.
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"In my world it's a place of patterns and feel. In my world it's a haven for what is real. It's my world, nobody can steal it, but people like me, we live in the shadows." -Donna Williams
28 Dec 2007, 10:03 pm
