still ortho

I agree that you don’t have to eat the chemical stuff to recover. I think the overall thing that’s so healing is not to stress about what you’re eating. When I shop for my own groceries I try to avoid GMOs and high fructose corn syrup and the like and I buy local, organic as much as possible. I think it’s awesome that you don’t worry about eating at other people’s houses. That is very freeing for me too. I don’t worry about it when I’m eating out either except if I eat out consistently. I just don’t want to eat factory farmed meat or canola oil on a usual basis. But I think it’s totally fine to avoid certain things for your own home.

However, when I was first recovering I did buy certain things that I never ate such as candy (that had high fructose corn syrup) and other things. Now I just notice that I’d rather eat some good chocolate that I know all the ingredients.

Do you notice that you feel good when you eat certain things? It might be nice to buy whatever you want and what makes you feel the best. How long have you been eating the food and recovering? It’s frustrating but it can take a while to feel better. I think it’s great to try and push yourself to get over orthorexia but I honestly don’t think it’s a problem to look on the back of products that will be in your home and avoid chemicals/GMOs. I am not an expert and so this may be wrong and if looking at ingredients is stopping you from eating enough calories than by all means don’t look and just buy whatever you’d like:) I think the main point is to eat enough calories.

I have been eating the processed crap, and I believe it is working. There are still a lot of things I will stay away from, and I know when my body is in a better place I will cut down on the processed junk. But for now I think I need it. I just cant seem to get enough calories in if I don’t. However I do beat myself up over it a bit sometimes because what Im eating isn’t ‘ethical’, and sometimes still wonder if I am killing myself by doing this… But there are plenty of great success stories on this website, as well as plenty of people around me who ‘eat the food’ who are in good health and are happy.. so why cant I?

Due to the amount of calories I am eating, when I wasn’t eating junk/processed foods I felt like I didn’t have time for a life outside of preparing all my food. And I just got sick of eating sooo much damn food and never feeling satisfied or warm.

I dont eat junk all the time, and I still have staples that I rely on throughout my day, but to be honest I am enjoying the most is not having to prepare all my food, or taking it with me anytime I go anywhere. Chilling the F*&$ out and trying not to think about “food” all the god damn time. I think this is a big part of it.

Its not going to happen over night unfortunately, and the more I think about how long recovery is going to be the more I dig myself into a psychological trap, and stress and worry about how I look, or what others think about how I look, or what they think about what I eat. But F*&$ what everyone thinks. Take one day at a time. We’ll get there!

If something isn’t working, its time to try something new.

I’ve managed to loosen up quite a lot, and more importantly, I think enough. I think it’s helpful to think of this as short term. How much worse can it be to indulge a little than what we’ve already done to our bodies restricting. If you have major ortho issues, maybe you need to just eat some real serious junk, but it’s not that hard to eat food with almost all real ingredients. There is plenty of chocolate out there with no junk and there is always decent if not great ice cream available. I rarely find it necessary or desirable to eat anything with artificial flavoring or total garbage ingredients even on a pretty tight budget. My health food coop carts have had to get smaller and my grocery outlet carts bigger, but there is plenty of real food out there. If you are not on a budget, you can even do it organic for the large part. I have the added problem of not having enough energy to play healthy home economist and that limits me mostly to easily prepared foods. I do bake a batch of cookies or something now and again.

But, if you want to eat all organic, and all whole foods, you might have a problem, especially if it’s going to cause you to stress out in the grocery isle. Refined carbs are especially hard to do this without. So, you’ll have to just loosen up a little and accept that some non-organic ingredients and refined stuff, and maybe even sometimes some real junk food with non-food ingredients, is probably not the thing you need to be worrying most about and may even really *need* to eat to get over yourself for a minute. And really look hard at what actually is and isn’t junk food. My few experiments with real junk food didn’t leave me wanting more to say the least. And after three months or so, I want more nutritious whole foods than I did at first. I rarely eat, or want, unprocessed grains yet, but I’m going to follow my bodies cues on that for the most part. I do make my pancakes with some awesome local heritage whole wheat pastry flour and that seems to go down pretty well. Anyway, I think it’s fine and healthy to worry about what’s in the stuff a little. But, if it’s causing you a bunch of stress, or you really want the bag of potato chips fried in canola oil, or the loaf of white bread, just eat the stuff and worry about it later. That’s my take on it. I guess it’s gotten easier as I’ve realized that no, I’m not going to drop dead or feel like I’m dying from eating some junky food once in a while, and that the stress of going through life wondering if the stuff of life, food, is going to kill me if I am not constantly vigilant, is probably much worse than loosening up to a reasonable degree and enjoying life and the food that makes it possible. How much to loosen up probably depends on how neurotic we are, the more neurotic, probably the more crap we need to eat to get over it. Oh the irony! ;)