Health Food Junkies: Orthorexia Nervosa: Overcoming the Obsession with Healthful Eating

***** Health Food Junkies: Orthorexia Nervosa: Overcoming the Obsession with Healthful Eating is a thorough exploration of a common but normally undiscussed problem in the health food community---a healthy focus which progresses into a fixation or obsession with "correct" or "right" eating. I like to think of it as the energy with which we focus on healthy eating. For example, you can have a healthy desire to lose weight...if you focus on this desire to the exclusion of other, more important things, you can slip into anorexia nervosa, and you may not realize it until someone else points it out to you. Dr. Bratman's book is this "someone" shining the light on the psychological factors behind so-called "healthy obsessions". This book was extremely helpful to me. I have previously followed various healthy diets, from vegetarian to vegan to raw foods, and struggled with balancing the many positives of such choices with some of the negatives. Health Food Junkies helped me to see myself more clearly, to see sort out my various psychological issues, and to put my desire to eat healthfully into balance. I think I'm making healthier choices overall with respect to my diet and my life in general. There are many psychological factors to consider when eating healthfully, and some of the ones that Dr. Bratman covers are: control and safety issues, fears, idealized body images, using food as a primary source of spiritual satisfaction, food Puritanism, deprivation and self-punishment, creating an identity, being separate from others, hiding and escaping from life, and more. Styles of eating which are covered are food allergies, raw foods, macrobiotics, the Zone, candida, "Eat Right for Your Type", vitamin pills, the beer and pizza diet, and several other extreme diets. The author, Steven Bratman, M.D. speaks from experience, as he was previously a raw foodist and a macrobiotic eater, plus has helped patients recover from obsessions with healthful eating that in some cases has even cost them their lives, and often, their health. At a minimum, such an obsession costs one's emotional and spiritual well-being. He is absolutely totally in favor of eating well, but not at the expense of other parts of a healthy lifestyle. This book will help you put your interest in healthful eating into balance. Even if you think it is in balance, it's good to read just to be aware of how things can get when you veer away, sometimes very gradually, from moderation. If you think moderation is a bad thing, you really, really should read this book. If you know someone whose eating obsessions are unusual, you'd find this interesting, too. *****

My endorsement of this book stems from my (rather unusual?) personal experience. After reading the other reviews, it's hard to tell if anyone else might be approaching this book from the same place I did. Regardless, I hope I can offer insight to some.I owe it to Dr. Bratman that I now know when my eating disorder truly began. Though I am now bulimic, orthorexia nervosa was my "gateway" disorder for over a year. I had no idea. I had always been taught that eating disorders were about diets and wanting to lose weight--I simply wanted to eat healthily. I wasn't interested in macrobiotic or raw food diets as Dr. Bratman describes, but I read the UC Berkeley School of Public Health Wellness Letters religiously, I researched everything I ate at the USDA nutrient data lab, and I counted every (milli)gram of fiber, protein, alpha omega three fatty acid, and polyunsaturated fat. I am not OCD. I just wanted to eat right. After all, what's wrong with taking care of myself? What, you want me to eat pizza and chips? How can you rationally endorse that?!And the essence of an eating disorder is the inordinate concentration on food to begin with. Internalizing article after article about "The War on Fat" and "America's Obesity Epidemic" made me all the more zealous. I think this book is essential reading, especially now, especially for people who see diet and exercise as the solution to life's ills. I fear all the attention and moralization on food in our culture will send more susceptible and naive individuals like myself into this stupid, threatening obsession.Kudos to Bratman and Knight for bringing to light the true harm in our food. It's not McDonald's. It's that some of us can attach so much moral weight and identity to such a relatively unimportant thing.

If one were to believe the negative reviews below, one could get the impression that Dr. Bratman recommends living on burgers and fries alone. Nothing could be further from the truth.Although this book is clearly written for a popular audience and is dominated by ancedotes, some of which may be a bit overly cute, the author does a very good job differentiating between the pursuit of a healthy diet (which he wholeheartedly approves of) and the elevation of diet into an ideology or religion, which is what he warns against. He supports his arguments both with scientific evidence and with personal observations.Among my acquaintances I see a wide variety of diet styles from junk food aficionados to health conscious eaters to allergen obsessed orthorexics, and I could see this book, with its truly holistic perspective in choosing a diet to maximize overall well-being, being of interest to all of them.

I recently had a huge fight with a macrobiotic friend over the "deadly" importance of such alien foods as nightshades (potatoes, tomatoes, eggplant and a few others), dairy products and fresh fruit. Now, I've been a macrobiotic myself for years and I was not arguing for MacDonalds, just saying that to complement a mostly-vegetarian diet with small amounts of good quality "forbidden" foods is not a "sin". I was so shocked by the out-of-proportion reaction of this apparently very open friend that I begun questioning my beliefs. And my conclusion was the same as Dr. Bratman: friends, it's all very well to eat healthy food but let's get real, food is food and if we were not so spoiled for choice we would eat whatever was available as our ancestors always did. I'm deeply appreciative of the positive way macrobiotic guidelines have helped me improve my diet but macrobiotic people (me included untill this friend's overzeal shocked me out of it) do tend to become fanatic and semi-religious about food. Does it seem reasonable to argue that while dairy food is "poisenous" (no matter that being used by humans for millenia) strange (and delicious, but that's not the point) food from Japan is vital for your well-being? Now, does this seem to you to have something to do with Macrobiotics being invented by a Japanese and that dairy food was unknown in Japan before being introduced by us, "barbarians"?Same applies to fresh fruit: I like fresh fruit and no only do I eat it daily as I eat it raw, the way nature provides us with it. Does this sound a bad habit to you? It would if you were macrobiotic because fresh fruit is too "Yin" in the macrobiotic view and thus creates an inbalance in anyone who eats it. But are really the philosophical and religious concepts of "Yin" and "Yang" the best tools to choose a lifestyle? Most macrobiotic people I know are coffee addicts and smoke heavily: they tend to think this is OK because caffeine and smoking are considered "Yang". This is so widespread that I had never thought about it before but clearly you have a psychological problem if you think that an apple or a bit of cheese are worse for your health than coffe and cigarettes.And this is all that Dr Bratman says: people with these behaviour problems should seek help.

Many diet gurus are selling more than a lunch: the philosophy that underlies their "ideal" diet can become more important than whether the diet works or not, and may become a powerful (even life-controlling) obsession. When that happens, you no longer have a diet, but an eating disorder: orthorexia nervosa. This disorder is probably more common than folks realize; it is prevalent in "extreme" diets like raw foods and macrobiotics, where some diet gurus actually suggest that you can become more "perfect" via diet.Dr. Bratman's book is the first to shine light on the dark underside of the "ideal" diets. The book includes information on how orthorexia can begin, a diagnostic test, and advice on how to overcome orthorexia and reclaim your life. This book will be denounced by the very diet gurus whose income depends on selling you a dysfunctional diet philosophy that promises "perfect health, happiness, or even godhood" - all from what is on your lunch plate. As silly as that seems, many people are scammed by the diet gurus. This book will help you avoid being scammed.