Obsessed: America's Food Addiction by Mika Brzezinski

Author:Mika Brzezinski [Brzezinski, Mika]
Language: eng
Format: epub
Tags: (¯`'•.¸//(*_*)\\¸.•'´¯)
ISBN: 9781602861763
Amazon: 1602861765
Publisher: Weinstein Books
Published: 2013-05-07T04:00:00+00:00

CHAPTER SIX

MIKA AND DIANE: MAKING PROGRESS, STILL STRUGGLING

OUR STORY, WITH DR. MARGO MAINE,

LISA POWELL, SUE GEBO, D’MARIO SOWAH,

ANDY DEVITO, DR. THOMAS LANE

By the time we reached the halfway point in writing this book, Diane had lost forty pounds. Meanwhile, I was still driving myself crazy with thoughts of food and desperate to find enough piece of mind to achieve, and stop at, a ten-pound weight gain. I was still living hungry most of the time.

As I began confiding more about my eating habits and obsessions to Diane, she began pushing me harder to deal with my attitudes toward food and weight. She thought I was masking some of my emotional issues, instead of dealing with them directly. Finally, I agreed to talk with clinical psychologist Dr. Margo Maine, a nationally known specialist in eating disorders. Margo is also co-founder of the Maine & Weinstein Specialty Group in West Hartford, Connecticut.

Margo presented me with a completely different way of thinking about my eating patterns when she surprised me with a diagnosis of orthorexia nervosa. The doctor who originated the term, Steve Bratman, explained that “orthorexia nervosa indicates an unhealthy obsession with eating healthy food.” The term derives from the Greek word orthos, which means “right,” or “correct,” and orexia, meaning “appetite,” and is intended to sound like a relative of anorexia nervosa.

I was pissed off at first. Now I’m in trouble for eating too well??? As you can imagine, my first session with Margo was a little rocky. I have almost entirely quit the junk food that used to captivate me. And that’s bad?

“We get so much information about food, and if you’re health conscious it can kind of morph into an obsession,” Margo explained patiently. “Lots of people get into that today.”

Food, it seemed, was still owning me.

Orthorexia nervosa is part of a larger category referred to as “eating disorders not otherwise specified.” Margo said, “In that diagnosis, people can have some anorexic diagnostic indicators, some bulimic indicators, sometimes they have a combination of the two, but they don’t meet the full criteria for either one. Their concerns about their body and their eating are a driving force, so that’s the unifying factor.”

Margo said that some 40–60 percent of eating disorders fall into that nonspecific category and suggested my approach to food might put me there, too. “A lot of my patients eat really good foods,” she told me. “They just don’t eat enough of them, and they don’t eat enough of the fats and other things that give you a feeling of fullness. When you get some fat in your gut the message goes back to your brain that you’re starting to feel full, and it will help you slow down your eating.” Without enough fat in my diet, I tend to feel hungry, so I have to use all this willpower to keep myself from devouring more food.

A lot of my patients eat really good foods. They just don’t eat enough of them, and they don’t eat enough of the fats and other things that give you a feeling of fullness.

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