What is Orthorexia?

“We live in a culture that celebrates and encourages disordered eating,” my dietitian tells me. We meet every other week, and talk about how to eat intuitively; how to dissociate the words “good” and “bad” from food, and how difficult that is, especially when diet talk is everywhere. This conversation is especially pertinent in light of the new Weight Watchers app for children, Kurbo, which perpetuates the very behaviors I now go to therapy to unlearn.

When individuals want to lose weight, the most common advice they receive is to eat less and move more. Counting calories is widely heralded as critical to weight loss-Jillian Michaels recommends eating “no less” than 1,200 calories per day for women, or 1,600 calories per day for men. For some, these guidelines may work. For others, they will undoubtedly fail. And extreme weight loss, like the weight loss shown on NBC’s hit show Biggest Loser, underscores the incredibly nuanced difficulty of maintaining extreme weight loss.

A study published in the journal Obesity found that all but one of the former Biggest Loser contestants from seasons 1–8 had gained back at least some of the weight they lost during the 30-week reality TV competition. Long term, all of the study participants had dramatically slower metabolisms and drastically less leptin-the hormone that signals hunger and satiety. Combined, these factors make maintaining dramatic…