Orthorexia And The Fear Of Death

Orthorexia is the expression from the body sharing its fear of dying.

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Orthorexia is the obsession with super healthy or clean eating. People may restrict certain foods or food groups and be particular about how meals are cooked. They may choose to not eat out at restaurants or at social events or have set Meal times.

These rules are created to support someone’s personal idea of health. Whilst there is nothing wrong with choosing health, people navigating orthorexia experience extreme guilt or shame when they “break” their rules, which usually results in self-punishment.

The healthy eating rules are often very rigid, and if people don’t seek support, these rules become narrower and harder to get out of.

Orthorexia impacts many people, in subtle and extreme ways, especially in diet culture where certain foods are moralized and others are demonized (to read more on diet culture, I highly recommend the extensive work by Chrisy Harrison). Diet culture can make orthorexia hard to identify since we live in matrix where many orthorexia tendencies are normalized or championed.

When I came across the term “orthorexia” a many years ago, I started to see how I was also struggling with it.

I could trace Orthorexic tendencies to my childhood where being seen as healthy by those around me gave me a sense of “I’m doing ok and I’m a good human.”

Seeing where this restrictive form of eating came from made sense, but it didn’t explain why I still felt terror when eating “unhealthy” foods in the presence of others who loved me for me and who thought I was a good human regardless.

When I went underneath the fear of eating “unhealthy” foods, I met a deeper fear.

I started to see how much fear I held around dying.

The orthorexic voice was trying to keep me alive by having me eat only the cleanest of clean foods.

Little did I know at the time that my obsession with healthy eating was actually killing me due to restriction I was placing on certain kinds of foods.

I don’t think death is spoken often enough in eating disorder recovery.

I don’t think death is spoken often enough. Period.

At the core, I think this what many of us are afraid of - and all of the maladaptive behaviours and addictions are in some way attempts to push away the reality of death.

This fear is totally understandable in a world that tries to defy aging, ignores wisdom from elders, vilifies the season of winter, leaves out any rituals that signify the ending of something, runs away from grief and forgets about the exhale.

Our culture doesn’t support death. And diet culture certainly doesn’t. We are instead filled with fear when we are reminded of impermanence.

Orthorexia is an expression of the fear of death. This means that the body and the nervous system are in a state of fear - and so how we go about supporting folks who are navigating orthorexia should be done with a lot of kindness, compassion and safety.

Any eating disorder recovery treatment that instills more fear, shame or pathology only leads to the nervous system putting up more defense and protection.

For a nervous system to come out of fear, we have to greet it with safety, containment and attunement.

As such, eating disorder recovery is the process of allowing the feelings of fear be authentically felt whilst held in a safe way. We don’t have to ask the body to do anything else than what it is authentically experiencing.

Over time, we learn about what it means to accept change and impermanence in day-to-day life, and preparing the nervous system to hold the diversity of feels that arise in that process of accepting that things end.

Recovery is allowing the old body to evolve so that our new body - that can hold more of life with greater capacity - can be embodied, carving the way forward for our greatest aspirations and dreams to come to life.

Eating disorder recovery is about exploring nature’s seasons and the seasons within, giving permission to the body to move through its inner cycles of change.

Eating disorder and Orthorexia Recovery Are about noticing what things we grip onto for stability and familiarity, and to practice being curious about th things that we hold onto so tightly, whilst learning how to adapt, change and be in the ever-changing landscape of life.

Recovery is practicing making space internally rather than constricting when the opportunity to transform arises.

Recovery is learning about making peace with the fundamental nature of reality, which is inherently impermanent.

It’s about slowly developing capacity to step more and more into the vast unknown with grounded presence.

It’s about accepting that at the end of the day, we don’t know and that the only thing that is for certain is that all of this majesty and chaos, and tragic comedy of life, is all impermanent.