orthorexia

With celebrities suggesting that people eliminate entire food groups in the name of “cleansing” and/or “eating clean," Dr. Jessen comments: “I’ve had many, many patients, so many of them teenagers, convinced that their healthy lifestyle and their clean-eating regime was really helping them when actually all it was doing was helping them hide their increasingly disordered eating and to cover up an underlying eating disorder.”

I would wonder if others saw me as “super healthy” or as a “fit chick” — or if they had those thoughts at all. I was constantly consumed with every minute detail of my lifestyle, wondering if it was going to take me closer or further away from my ideal body.

[CN: ED (binge eating), orthorexia]

[CN: eating disorders, thinspo] It’s easy to disguise disordered eating when it's become standard to mask a binge as a “cheat meal,” orthorexia as a “lifestyle,” and exercise addiction as “beast mode.”

My biggest nightmare came true. I gained weight.

The thing about exercise is, it doesn't present like an illness. Neither does dramatic weight loss. Suffering is revered. Pain is praised. The more I endured, the more I was. Marathon training, riding my bike 10 miles a day, lifting weights for 45 minutes, running the stairs at work: I was "dedicated."