WHEN 'HEALTHY' BECOMES A DANGEROUS OBSESSION

It was as she was standing in her kitchen crying over a sweet potato that Zoe Janda first began to suspect something was very wrong.

For months, the 27-year-old had been following a strict diet and exercise regime in preparation for a bodybuilding competition. She had a coach tell her what to eat. She went to the gym seven days a week, morning and night. Bodybuilding became an obsession, then an identity. And so the day after the competition, as she stood in her kitchen making lunch, Janda was suddenly struck with the realisation she didn’t need to follow a strict regime any more – the competition was done and dusted. Yet instead of freedom, she felt trapped.

“I wasn’t sure if I was ‘allowed’ to eat the sweet potato or not. That was my first red flag,” Janda, now 37, tells marie claire. “Bodybuilding was all I was focused on and when that was gone, it was just me by myself. That was my starting point. The competition was the catalyst for orthorexia.”

Orthorexia nervosa, a term coined in 1997 by American physician Steven Bratman, involves an obsession with healthy or “clean” eating. Those living with orthorexia will often fixate on food “purity” and quality but not necessarily the quantity of food. “People diagnosed with orthorexia will subscribe to a range of rules that are often based on a narrow definition of health, and this may be driven by a variety of reasons,” explains Sarah McMahon, psychologist and director of BodyMatters Australasia. “For example, avoiding supposed allergens or ‘intolerances’ [to things] such as gluten or lactose – when there is no medical advice to do so – or restricting processed food in an attempt to avoid dying. One primary difference between orthorexia and other eating disorders is that there is a focus on being ‘healthy’, rather than weight or shape concerns.”