It started as a simple lifestyle change. You wanted to do something to feel healthier.
Going to the gym everyday didn’t seem like enough. Clean eating was another way to step up your game.
But, it didn’t end here…
You started cutting out additional foods.
You began increasing the time you spent preparing foods.
You can’t buy something without reading the ENTIRE label and deeming it “appropriate”.
You increased the time spent at the gym.
You stopped going to people’s houses for fear of night having something appropriate for you to eat.
You won’t go to restaurants that don’t have “safe” choices.
You stopped associating with people who don’t have the same food beliefs and spend most of your time reading about more ways to “improve” your healthy eating habits.
Others are concerned about your eating habits.
You don’t understand their concern.
You feel in-control of your eating choices, not like those people who feel out of control all of the time. And you weren’t even interested in losing weight.
Is this an eating disorder, you think to yourself.
One day you wake up and realize you can visualize the workout you did and you can name the ingredients of every item you ate yesterday, but you can’t remember anything else.
What began as a way to improve your life, has taken away any quality of life you had. You realize you want more out of life, but the anxiety around stepping away from this life is debilitating.
Orthorexia destroys people’s lives. While everyone around you can sit down to dinner and enjoy being together, you now have to fight with your own thoughts about ways to get out of being there.
The team at Bricolage can help you move away from the unhealthy obsession you experience around healthy eating.
Explore the emotions that have been contained for so long through restrictive eating, exercise and obsessive thoughts.
Develop a new list of values that feel more congruent to the lifestyle you truly want to lead.
Put the energy and time you spent with food towards fostering the relationships with people you want to connect more meaningfully with.
Discover a new relationship with food and yourself through the support of our clinicians.
