Eating healthy, what does it mean? Many people read on the net or hear that butter must be eliminated, dairy products and cheeses are bad, cereals contain antinutrients, gluten is bad, meat is worse, sugar is equivalent to a hard drug. The new information of recent years has added to what we already thought we knew and on which we were sure : eggs do not because they contain cholesterol, you need to drink lots of water, eat without salt, and so on. And if a percentage of these people do not worry too much and continue to eat as usual, the percentage of people who , following a series of preconceptions and believing they are right, say goodbye to entire categories of foods grows, such as those that contain gluten and dairy products, thus hoping to get less sick, be fit and generally feel good. Instead of getting sick they get sick, of something called orthorexia: the fixation of healthy eating is a real eating disorder , and even if it is not often diagnosed, in Australia they begin to treat it as such, thanks to the work of Butterfly Foundation which launched the alert.

Therefore: if you are obsessed with the idea of ​​avoiding pesticides or GMOs, potentially lethal substances, foods that are bad for you, if you repress the desire to eat certain things or have completely excluded them from your diet because you believe they are bad for you, if you plan well your diet is too rigid, if you stock up on superfoods and every time you eat something you like but shouldn’t eat in your opinion, you tell yourself that “you deserve it”, if going out to dinner is a nightmare and when you meet friends and relatives explain to him that you do not eat pasta or meat or legumes for reasons that you believe are scientific, if you give unsolicited diet advice and if you are heavily influencing the life of your family, know that you are no stranger to this disorder.

The number of people suffering from orthorexia continues to grow: this disorder causes a lot of stress, anxiety, digestive problems, health problems such as amenorrhea in women ( we talk about it here, in English ) limits the quality of life and often, paradoxically , leads people to become undernourished and, after an initial improvement, their health conditions worsen.