Is Orthorexia In Vogue?
Whenever I’m asked who this blog is for, I inevitably say it’s for my teenage self—and for teenagers who are like her. So it might not be too surprising that my hot button issue is the way the media talks to teenage girls. For example, in magazines like Teen Vogue that may be subtly promoting eating disorders—in this case, via an article that is ostensibly about how healthy eating can go too far.
“I can’t help but look down on my friends when they give in to temptations like pizza or ice cream.”
“I refuse to put anything poisonous—like processed foods—in my body. I’ll stay this way forever.”
If you flip back a page, you’ll discover that these are not diet tips, per se, but quotes from real girls in a story about orthorexia. Orthorexia is a fixation on healthy eating, which Tara Gidus, National Spokesperson For the American Dietetic Association tells Teen Vogue: “It’s not quite an eating disorder, but it is a form of disordered eating.” Phew! As long as it’s not an actual eating disorder, then we can promote it, right? Wait! Gidus goes on to say: “It could easily lead to bulimia if you binge on unhealthy food and feel like you need to get rid of it. And the rigid nature of the disease could also lead to anorexia.”
As Jezebel points out, the magazine isn’t actually suggesting that teenagers try out this form of eating. In fact, they point it out as an example of what not to do. But when the article is followed by an aspirational photo of an extremely thin model, that is what I would call a mixed message at the very least.
Posted by mo pie
Filed under: Advocacy, Books, Celebrities, Eating Disorders, Fashion, Feminism, Kids, Magazines, Media
Well, it’s just an outgrowth of the whole, “Oh, hon, we’re not telling you how to LOOK. No, no, no, no. We just want you to be HEALthy, that’s all.”
It’s possible that the model in that photo is healthy, but her thighs scare me.
They just did a piece on this on 20/20 last Friday night. I think if you go to their website you can still see/read it. They focused on 3 people who struggled/struggle with it. It’s actually a disorder and people can get way caught up in it. One woman died from it because her diet restrictions became so severe. One guy looked like he would drop over at a moments notice and his restrictions were just unbelievable. One woman actually beat it and was getting better. It was very interesting. They also interviewed an author/speaker who was pushing his book and his Orthorexia lifestyle claiming it leads to long life and better living. He was only a few years older than John Stossel but looked like he could be his father.
My 12-year old stepdaughter will only eat food that doesn’t have a fat content. Up until this blog post I didn’t know that had a name.
Thanks for opening my eyes to it.
It doesn’t stop at magazines. The Hills, Gossip Girls, the entire MTV channel, and a million other unhealthy images are out there. I hadn’t heard of Orthorexia, but being obsessed or fixated on anything is a problem.
My daughter just went to college. I’ve spent the last four years trying to help her and her friends sort out all these mixed messages. It’s not easy. All of them suffered from some form or another of an eating disorder…one having to be hospitalized because her pulse was down to 30 beats per minute. Killing herself, literally, to look like someone on the OC.
I remember being a teenager when Tracy Gold was on the cover of People with her little bitty anorexic body, and thinking both that it was too bad I didn’t have the will power to be anorexic and that the article seemed to be giving me a point-by-point instruction on how to do it. Nothing has changed.
As long as these magazines (and movies, TV shows, ads, etc) feature super-skinny girls (most of whom have to take extreme measures to stay that way), all the “advice” will not only fall on deaf ears, it will be used as a how-to manual for eating disorders.
Actions speak louder than words.
I struggled with orthorexia for a couple of years and it drives me nuts that this sort of disordered eating gets downplayed because it’s seen as barely different from what we “should” do to get our proper moral value out of the food we eat. Even if I was not starving myself into a slow death, I was eating based on some phony sense of guilt and obligation and not based on listening to my body and living my life. There was always guilt, no matter how “healthy” I ate. Like dieting turning stricter and stricter, my disorder did the same. Even if I ate the “right” foods, I ate too much of them.
Was I eating nothing but lettuce or binging and purging? No. But my life was revolving around food and simple things like cooking with my boyfriend were nearly impossible because I wanted to freak out if he used more than the bare minimum amount of oil to grease the pan. Food was my life, both in terms of the obsession with being the healthiest eater ever and the self-berating that I couldn’t manage to eat less or didn’t know the exact nutritional content of some meals.
It was not mentally healthy and - what I didn’t realize until after beginning to recover - it wasn’t physically healthy either. Though I seemed to eat enough food, there wasn’t enough energy in it. And there was WAY too much fiber and too little fat, which lead to some pretty serious intestinal discomfort. Unfortunately, the overwhelming guilt and fear made it very hard to figure that out for awhile.
See, I thought theTeen Vogue article did have an approving tone. The whole “don’t go too far” sounded more like, “Don’t get caught”.
Orthorexia is another way of equating “health” and morality. (Scare quotes only because sometimes what people think is healthy isn’t, which is why you can die froma disorder where you supposedly only eat “healthy” foods.)
The real problem I see is that framing orthorexia as an obsession with healthy food and eating makes orthorexia seem like a very healthy disorder to have. Since you are making “healthy” choices, you are a morally superior person who really cares about taking care of yourself and won’t be a drain on society by becoming sick or disabled, etc. etc.
Cognitive dissonance much? Orthorexia is a mental illness that can cause you to ruin your health or even kill yourself. From what I can tell, it is a variation of anorexia, where sufferers have the same obsessive-compulsive patterns, the same need for control, and the same need to be perfect. Arguably, orthorexia is anorexia in disguise.
Giving teenage girls tips on how to do it is morally reprehensible. Implying that it’s a way to become a superior, better person is even more so.
Enomis, your comment seems very spot on with my experience. It wasn’t really about being healthy, it was partially about trying to look a certain way and mostly about obsessive-compulsive control and a desperate clinging to the moral superiority society associates with a certain way of eating (even as “authorities” disagree on what that way of eating is).
Ironically, it made me less healthy. I have a lousy stomach anyway and the combination of too little nourishment and too much fiber made it worse (and TMI: really, really gassy). I had less energy and frequent headaches and dizziness from failing to convince my body that what I’d eaten for breakfast was enough to last until lunch. I was so damn bloated all the time that I actually think I lost a little weight (I think - I also swore off the scale) when I started eating intuitively and eating more food.
I agree that it shouldn’t be framed as an obsession with healthy food but as an obsession with further and further restraining the rules of what is and isn’t acceptable to eat and conflating those rules with a strict sense of moral value.
“They also interviewed an author/speaker who was pushing his book and his Orthorexia lifestyle”
He was not promoting “Orthorexia”.
The man was promoting a raw food diet. Lot’s of not orthorexic people eat mostly if not completely raw food diets.
I do think he looked awful, and I also think that speaks volumes about his diet…but promoting Orthorexia? No, he wasn’t.
My (male) cousin developed something like this when he went away to university. His father and grandfather both died in their 40s of cancer, so it started with trying to lead a healthy life and avoid their fat. When he first lived away from home he “got really into healthy eating”, flirted with the raw food thing, was very strict about carbs and fat… and then his room mates started calling his mother to say they were worried because he was loosing a ton of weight and they never saw him eat any more.
Fortunately, she convinced him to see a doctor, and then he got a job at a restaurant, and the combination of being warned he was overdoing it, and being a poor student offered a free meal every shift won out in the end.
I think the whole thing lasted 6 months or so, and he was 19 or 20 so he may have also been naturally loosing his round boy-face, but he very suddenly went from slim muscular surfer to toothpick arms and spindly legs. Now he’s healthy and athletic again. At the time I didn’t know the term Orthorexia, but his restrictions all grew out of an obsession with “health”.
I thought the point of the article was to point out to girls that they could be harming themselves by following what they think is a healthy diet. I saw it as pointing out a problem and putting a name to it, though I did notice a few things they could have left out.
Cosmo Girl has an article about eating disorders and they note that they removed details that may be triggering… and in the same magazine they advise you on what to pick from a vending machine. They tell you to only eat half of a snack or granola bar because they can be high in calories. Yea…
Kyo, I saw that same article in Cosmo Girl. I was actually really glad that they featured two girls who were initially told they didn’t have eating disorders because they were fat. So that was decent… if only they didn’t have the counterbalancing vending machine crap. (Which, if there is anything better than a Snickers when you’re in the middle of your 5:30 seminar and you forgot to pack a snack, I don’t know of it.)
that was a bit eye opening. I have been trying to not eat processed foods. Not because I want to lose weight though just because I felt it was a more healthy option. Hmmm. I dont want to get caught up in all that disordered eating again though.
This is so true and so sad. Even worse is when doctors do it to teens - and a boy at that. One of my clients took their 12 year old son to the doctor for his regular exam and the doctor told him he was “overweight” for his age and needed to lose some. Now this child is perfectly normal looking to me. I can’t imagine where he would lose the weight from. But he is now obsessed with how many calories are in things, how much he eats and how much he weighs. I’m just horrified that a doctor would do this.