Bright Road Recovery Announces It Will Treat Orthorexia, Or Healthy Eating Gone Wrong
(PRWEB) March 11, 2015 -- Articles about clean eating, juice cleanses, veganism, the Paleo diet, low-carb eating and countless others are everywhere these days, making it difficult to know just what exactly to eat. Everyone has a friend who swears by one eating style or another, and people who are able to stick with a diet get endless praise about their willpower and lifestyle.
But dieting can hide a new kind of eating disorder. Studies show that some people, in an attempt to become healthy, develop an obsession around healthy eating that, like anorexia, can impact health and wellness. Called orthorexia, it is the slow elimination of foods from the diet which affects the ability to eat normally.
A person with orthorexia is focused on defining and strictly maintaining a perfect diet. Orthorexia may manifest as an aversion to foods with artificial ingredients, non-organic foods or GMO foods. It can extend to foods containing sugar, fat, salt, dairy or other ingredients the person might consider unhealthy.
“Orthorexia is an insidious condition,” said Claire St John, a Registered Dietitian at Bright Road Recovery in Claremont, CA. “Healthy eaters get all kinds of positive feedback from friends and family about how great their diet is and how admirable their willpower is. This can lead to further food elimination until there are very few ‘okay’ foods, resulting in food fixation, inability to eat with others and, at worst, nutrient deficiencies and dangerously low body weight.”
Bright Road Recovery, an outpatient eating disorder treatment center in Claremont Village, is well placed to address orthorexia with its new Health & Wellness program, offering nutrition and fitness counseling that rejects the diet hype and helps clients meet their goals without sacrificing their health or enjoyment of food.
“Our Health & Wellness program is tailored to each client,” said Tamson Overholtzer, Bright Road Recovery’s Executive Director. “We start with professional nutritional counseling, and then depending on a client’s needs, we may suggest other resources to support any areas of concern. It’s a healthy way for clients to achieve their goals without slipping into a problem they didn’t see coming.”
Bright Road Recovery is the first outpatient eating disorder program in our area to make general nutritional counseling available outside of the eating disorder treatment program.
“Our expanded services meet the needs of clients who are stepping down from higher levels of care or who are looking for nutritional guidance unrelated to eating disorders, but with an eye toward protecting against developing disordered eating habits”, Overholtzer said.
For additional information, see our website at http://www.brightroadrecovery.com or contact us at (909)994-1436.
Tamson Overholtzer, Bright Road Recovery, http://www.BrightRoadRecovery.com, +1 (909) 994-1436, [email protected]
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