Orthorexia

A couple of years ago, my high-school buddy Judy gave me an article about Orthorexia - the compulsion to eat healthfully. The two pages fell victim to my “filing system” and only recently resurfaced from the depths of my desk piles.

Judy knew me when I was rail thin, and my dad was still alive. Later, she and I took our kids camping together. It was on those trips to California beaches and in-the-redwoods state parks that my need to control what I was putting in my mouth was highlighted for her. I made food for all of us in advance and froze it, put together whole grain flour and all else that (then, to my mind, in the mid 1970’s) made up batter for “healthy” pancakes.

The result of my careful planning, besides comforting me, was that it earned the admiration of Judy’s son when he became a teen and began to eschew junk food, and my actions earned the appropriate wary eye of my friend - who always tells it like it is.

The truth is, I do have some obsessive behavior around eating, and have had for as long as I can remember. It wasn’t until memories of early childhood sexual abuse surfaced that I at least understood a potential source for my need to choose carefully  what I put into my mouth and body. The nature of the abuse, which began before I had teeth to bite and chew, made it difficult for me to discern nourishment from inappropriate substances which children should not swallow.

Judy doesn’t even know the worst of it. Perhaps the zenith (or nadir) of my obsession with control over food occurred in 2004, when I traveled to Brazil for the first time. I had become a raw food devotee in 2001 and for this ten day trip carefully prepared and froze many packets of cured raw chicken, fish and beef, (think Ceviche), and protein drinks. More than half of my luggage was food packed in an ice chest with blue ice. This was the fare I felt safe (compelled) to eat.

My Somatic Experiencing colleagues and I landed in Belo Horizonte during a walloping rain storm. The drive up the mountain, Carlos our driver told us, normally takes two to two and a half hours. This night it took nearly four. We arrived in the dark, as the electricity had been knocked out by the storm. There was no refrigeration. Over the next three days, all that food I had brought went bad.

The wisdom of the elements gave me a very clear message, hobbling my hubris. “When in Rome, do as the Romans do.” The folly of my actions made me laugh, and I realized that in the mountains of Brazil during their winter, people don’t thrive on raw food. The nourishment of the hot soups, baked fish, poultry, and finely shaved collards - that looked like brilliant, vibrantly alive sea-greens - sunk in and stuck to my actual and emotional ribs. I was being held gently in a community specifically built to heal its members.

That first night we were greeted warmly, by candlelight and firelight. Our first sensory awareness of this marvelous community was scent. The gorgeous warm smell of soup simmering on the wood stove enveloped us before we came in out of the rain. The quiet sounds of silver on china, inquiries and intros softly spoken in the most beautiful language I’d heard yet in my life - Portuguese - and the strong hugs, hands extended to guide us in the dark, and delicious flavors of food lovingly prepared completed our sensory welcome.

With gratitude and humility, I drank in the nurturing like the hungry child I was.

It would be a lie to say, I’m over orthorexia, but my goals are more realistic these days. This body has always been my laboratory. I’m the scientist; I’m the Guinea pig. Knowing that my joints ache with too much sugar, that my gut and mucous membranes react to dairy, and that I have a whole body allergic reaction to gluten, I can navigate my way more quietly and with less fanfare and angst through most menus. I’m not out to proselytize, chastise, or baptize anyone into the one true way to eat. I hope that my daughters may understand and forgive my past neuroses and find their own path - a middle path between junk bingeing as a steady diet and nose-in-the-air-self-righteousness denial of good food offered in welcome to a hungry heart.

Our therapist gave me a great gift recently. She said that free-floating anxiety is always looking for a place to land. Our trip to the Galápagos Islands mid January gave me a visual. Frigate birds are opportunistic creatures. They let the pelicans, boobies and penguins catch food and then steal it from their mouths for their own babies. I can now see that my free-floating anxiety - that discomforted feeling that the other shoe is about to drop - seeks a place to land so I can throw myself full bore into the project of protecting myself or controlling something! 

Watching where the Frickin’ Frigate anxiety wants to land is a discipline. Acting anxiously and trying to control every little morsel I want to eat is a choice. I can choose not to grasp. I can choose to be at ease around food. I can choose to eat chocolate or not. Maybe. After all, Chocolate is a major food group all its own. I need some every day. It makes me feel healthy!