Orthorexia nervosa is an eating disorder wherein individuals demonstrate an obsession towards proper or healthy eating.
Of course, being aware of the nutritional quality of the food you eat isn’t necessarily a bad thing.
But when these fixations start taking a toll on your body, leeching at your mental health, and challenging your relationships…that’s when these obsessions become diseases.
And Jane, well, she has orthorexia
For Jane, each morning looks the same. She read somewhere that 9 hours of sleep are optimal for promoting muscular growth, so she’s started sleeping on a schedule lately.
Down at 9:30, up at 6:30.
Like clockwork, she wakes up, brushes the hair out of her face, and walks to the scale to find her morning weight.
Some days, she’s happy with the numbers she sees. She’s happy that her work is paying off--that she can pick and choose the things she eats, tinker with amount of exercise she gets, and guarantee herself the body she wants.
And other days, well, most days, she steps on the scale over and over again--hoping that that the numbers will change for her.
Ah, a tad over weight today. A half pound off. Jane’s not cutting weight as fast as she should be.
So she reaches for her phone and signs into her nutrition log.
And she decides to change her daily caloric intake to 1700 from 1800--reducing the amount of carbohydrates and fats she eats and increasing her protein consumption.
She does this a lot, actually--fiddling with her macronutrient goals with excruciating detail. Following the latest literature in nutrition and exercise science.
Using her own body as the experiment, as if she’d be able to control her shape and size with some sort of certainty. Like death and taxes.
But she never can, not to her standards at least.
As if in disbelief at the numbers on the scale, she faces the mirror
“Assessing the damage”, she says sometimes.
“Waist could be tighter. Legs are looking skinny--arms too.”
She hates what she sees on the scale, sure--but she hates the mirror more
Jane puts on a sweater to hide her body from her roommates, just in case they come downstairs. Could others see her flaws with the same acuity and disgust with which she sees herself?
Jane didn’t want to risk it.
Finally, she steps out of her room for the first time that day
Just like her sleep schedule, Jane’s breakfast never changes.
If she’s trying to put on more muscle, she’ll add a couple of eggs to the mix, 15 grams of almond butter, a banana, sometimes, to replenish her muscle glycogen stores for a morning workout.
Still, the foundations are always the same.
Jane portions 200 grams of oats, 200 grams of egg-whites, 25 grams of unsweetened cocoa powder, and two packets of stevia, mixes them together in a bowl with some water, and throws it in the microwave for two minutes.
In total, as she records each morning onto her phone, the food comes out to 412 calories, 48 grams of protein, 41 grams of carbohydrates, and 6 grams of fat.
When was it that Jane stopped eating for the sake of enjoyment and started to look at food as a series of numbers and daily percentages?
Now, food’s just a means to an end. The numbers, a reflection of her own character and self-worth.
Just last night, Jane stood in the bathroom with her head hung over the toilet, purging what was left of the meal that she’d miscalculated and eaten too much of
Her only worry being that she’d throw up too much and undershoot her caloric intake for the day.
And Jane can’t remember the last time she’s had lunch with her friends anymore.
Look at that! Delicious. The perfect pre-workout meal.
Jane usually works out from 8:30 until 10:30, before her class starts for the day.
On days that she weighs in high, though, she’ll add in an extra hour of steady-state cardio in the hopes that she cinches that number by the next day.
She’ll miss the class, sure, but it was never that important to her anyways.
Oh, it’s Jane’s roommate.
[Jane]: Hey! [Friend]: Hey! How are you? I swear I never see you anymore!
[Jane]: No, has it really been that long?
[Friend]: Yeah, we miss you… you should come out with us tonight! We’re going to this new steakhouse downtown.
[Jane]: Oh really?
[Friend]: Yeah, it’s supposed to have unreal food and stuff. Really nice bar, too! Please tell me you can come.
[Jane]: I’m so sorry, I actually have a project due tomorrow so I wouldn’t be able to make it.
[Friend]: Oh, okay. Yeah, no, I understand. We’ll just see you next time.
[Jane]: Okay, goodbye! Have a good time! [Friend]: You too, bye!
Jane, in fact, does not have a presentation due tomorrow. Nor does she have any other plans for the night.
In all honesty, she wasn’t at all concerned about how she was going to spend the night, who she’d spend it with, or the fact that she hadn’t spent time with her friends in weeks.
No, all that Jane had truly been thinking about during this conversation was how she was going to meet her macros. She couldn’t track the food that other people cooked--there were just too many variables.
How much oil did they use to cook the steak? How much butter did they use for the mashed potatoes? How much booze is there in this drink and how bad is my workout tomorrow going to be because of it?
Jane hadn’t eaten out in months and she knew that she couldn’t start now. Her friends would have to eat without her.
And after all this time, that still hurt Jane.
The end of Jane’s night is as routine as her mornings are. As per schedule, she starts getting ready for bed by 9 p.m.
Dinner was 150 grams of white rice, 200 grams of chicken breast, and two cups of broccoli for the volume.
Jane missed steak, sure, but she’d cut out red meats and pork from her diet anyways.
Too much fat, she says. Fish and chicken were a better source of lean protein--good for the heart too.
Salmon is Jane’s favourite, but it’s too fatty for her to eat at this stage of her diet. So, until her next bulking cycle, it’s only tilapia, haddock, and cod for Jane.
Which, to be honest, she hates. Jane isn’t much of a fan of chicken breast, either. She can’t fry it very often because of the extra fat.
She can’t salt it too heavily because she feels that the extra sodium bloats her and adds pounds to the numbers on the scale.
She can’t put sauce on it, because they’re often laden with carbohydrates and fat.
So, recently, it’s just been braised chicken, hot sauce, and as much garlic and pepper as she could shake onto the meat. That is to say, dinner was underwhelming, as it often was for Jane.
Now, before she goes to bed, she finishes the protein shake that she’d needed to meet her daily nutritional intake. And there it was: her daily log completed.
1700 total calories, 43 grams of carbohydrates, 191 grams of protein, and 85 grams of fat.
In terms of supplementation: 5 grams of creatine monohydrate, 5,000 IU of vitamin d, 10 grams of citrulline malate, and 200 milligrams of caffeine.
Jane was proud of the work she’d put in today--down to the last gram.
Before Jane closes her eyes for the night, she checks her phone for the last time. Instagram. Walls of bodies she’d idolized and yearned for as long as she could remember.
Thin waists, strong legs, thick backs, and lithe arms.
This, too, was part of the routine: to end the night with inspiration for the day after. That’s what Jane would tell you, of course.
But it was rarely inspiration
Just as a fire wouldn’t inspire you to leave the home or starvation wouldn’t inspire you to eat, these pictures and videos could hardly be as inspirational as they were fear provoking for Jane.
And thus lied the source of Jane’s obsession: her belief that each deviant calorie or macronutrient would dismantle the self-actualization that she’d been working towards all these years
That these lapses in consumption were reflections of her character and worth.
Jane was fearful… and she’d been fearful for a while.
She steps onto the scale at the end of each night, hoping that seeing the right numbers could dispel some of these fears and let her feel as though she was worthwhile
Like her work hadn’t been for nothing and that her day had truly held a sense of value.
But she was still a little over
Jane reaches for her daily log and reduces her caloric limit from 1700 to 1600.