In the health craze – how the urge to eat healthy almost took away Lyn

“The insidious thing about orthorexia is that the disease sneaks up on you,” says Lyn.

When the 35-year-old, whose real name is different but wishes to remain anonymous, tried one diet after another in her twenties, she became morbidly concerned about healthy eating. The more she learned about healthy eating, the more she limited her diet. A strictly regulated diet dominated her daily life for years.

A constant companion was the fear of harming her body with unhealthy food. This went so far that she withdrew socially, ate only pureed vegetables and was made of skin and bones. After a frightening warning, she fought her way back to life, pound by pound.

One of Lyn’s colleagues is enthusiastic about fitness training. Lyn is dissatisfied with her body and considers coming along. She is in her early twenties, overweight and exercising is the last thing on her mind. Yet she overcomes herself.

The pounds will fall off quickly. The compliments about her loss of weight motivate her to exercise even more. At the same time, she discovers the composition and ingredients of food and their effect on the body in magazines, books and on the internet.

“Meat contains bad fats, that’s what I believed at the time,” says Lyn. “I read countless unscientific nutrition reports and cut more and more foods out of my diet. I found something bad in almost every food.”

The food palette shrinks to what plants provide, i.e. fruits and vegetables. She even finds something unhealthy in some vegetables. Something that couldn’t be good for her body. Something that can cause your blood to clot or cause inflammation.

Lyn is not alone in this. In a 2010 Swiss survey, one in three people said they overindulged in health-promoting diets, favored healthy foods or followed strict dietary rules. Orthorexia is not officially considered an eating disorder, but is treated the same as other eating disorders. It is not known how many people suffer from this.

“Healthy eating is a big topic in our society and it is not always easy to distinguish whether it is a healthy, balanced attitude to life or an eating disorder,” says Sarah Stidwill, psychologist and nutritionist at the Eating Disorders Working Group (AES). ), which supports people with eating disorders and eating problems.

This is not a new disease. “The urge to eat healthy can also occur with bulimia, for example.” Orthorexia often occurs as a mixed form or sometimes alternates with other eating disorders. «Orthorexia can start with the desire to eat healthier, do something for your health and the environment. Over time, more and more rules are added, putting more and more restrictions on those affected.”

Lyn experiences this too.

For example, she cuts out nightshade plants such as tomatoes or eggplant because she read that eating the vegetables would not be good for her. Potatoes contain solanine, a slightly toxic substance that can cause stomach pain and nausea. Reason enough for Lyn to avoid the tuber completely.

“Almost all that was left was broccoli, carrots and sweet potatoes, which I pureed because I thought my body would absorb the nutrients better that way,” says Lyn. “Sometimes I had the wildest smoothie creations pureed that I would no longer eat today, for example pineapple, soy milk with thyme.” Sometimes she would also let herself eat some fried tofu to get some protein.

The energy for fitness does not decrease despite malnutrition. At least that’s what Lyn tells herself. «What drove me to the fitness center was no longer discipline, but an inner dictatorship. I had so little energy that I was breathing like a steamroller when I walked up the stairs.

But exercise is as much a part of her health plan as regular schedules: “I only ate at certain times. I didn’t want to eat anything between lunch and dinner so that my body could recover during this period. I also fasted sometimes. Looking back, I wonder where I got the strength to even get out of bed in the morning,” says Lyn.

Lyn has almost nothing left in her ribs, although she does not care about being as thin as possible, but about being pure.

“I always thought that if I ate something that didn’t follow my rules, I would poison myself or clog my mitochondria. “I was always fantasizing about something,” says Lyn.

At this point, Lyn can hardly stand it when someone criticizes her diet. Visiting a restaurant has also put a lot of pressure on her over the years: “I only ordered one salad at a time. The next day I wanted to sweat the salad out of myself because I was afraid there was something in the salad that could make me sick, an ingredient in the sauce for example. She increasingly isolated herself socially – out of shame, because she was ashamed of her eating habits.

She doesn’t really want to feel anything anymore. The excessive focus on controlling their diet distracts them from negative feelings.

The fact that those affected withdraw socially and no longer do the things they enjoy doing is a key feature of orthorexia, says eating disorder expert Sarah Stidwill. “Thinking about nutrition takes a lot of time and space.”

In the mirror, Lyn doesn’t notice that she is just skin and bones. “I saw myself as normal weight – not particularly thin.”

Lyn faints, her starved body no longer functions, she collapses for a moment.

The experience shook her up: “When I came to, I realized that things couldn’t go on like this.”

She noticed how poor her health was a few days later at a health fair when she had her body composition measured. “I was told I could die soon from organ failure,” says Lyn.

She takes the warning seriously. “The next day I got up and forced myself to eat something every three hours. I did this for weeks until I got back to a decent weight.”

Lyn realizes that her body needs the very foods she has feared for so long. But she can’t immediately get all the food back into her diet. “Over time I allowed myself to eat more and more. After a few months I got to the point where I dared to eat an egg. “I was so weak that the few nutrients the egg provided were enough to make me feel like I could pull up trees,” says Lyn.

Without help, Lyn fights her illness. She decided not to go to therapy because of a bad experience. “Before the orthorexia reached its nadir, I sought therapy. But for me, this experience was quite counterproductive. I had convinced myself that I had to prove to the therapist that I was sick enough to qualify for therapy. So I ate even less and cut even more foods from my diet.”

The nutritionist says: “The most important condition is that the person concerned wants to change something. In short, the sooner you take action and get help, the faster you can change your patterns and behavior and find a way out of the eating disorder.”

Meanwhile, Lyn has made a truce with food and developed an alert system that alerts you if things become critical again. If she notices many changes in her life that are beyond her control, orthorexia sometimes comes knocking. “The only thing I can control is the food,” says Lyn. Sarah Stidwill confirms that this behavior is typical of orthorexia: “People affected often have a desire to have something under control.”

Today, Lyn is no longer afraid of high-calorie foods. She has stopped categorizing food into healthy and unhealthy and is putting all her energy into sports. As an active competitive athlete, Lyn participates in marathon and ultramarathon runs and is involved as a guide in running camps. The sports competitions help her devour gummy bears and ice cream without feeling guilty. Foods she used to avoid.