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Orthorexia Nervosa involves an obsessive focus on only eating foods that are perceived as healthy, often leading to restrictive eating and anxiety. At ABBI Clinic, we specialise in providing expert orthorexia treatment, helping you to achieve a balanced and healthy relationship with food.
Orthorexia is an eating disorder characterised by an obsession with eating only ‘clean’ or ‘pure’ food. Rather than a healthy desire to eat a balanced diet, the condition refers to an extreme and unhealthy awareness and preoccupation with the quality of food.
This obsessive behaviour is often motivated by a need to exert control over your life or alleviate negative thoughts and emotions.
Straying from your established rules about food may cause negative emotional consequences, such as extreme anxiety, shame, and guilt.
Orthorexia can have detrimental consequences on physical and psychological health. You may incidentally remove essential nutrients from your diet or entire food groups, believing these foods to be ‘unclean’.
Differentiating between health-conscious habits and the obsessions associated with orthorexia nervosa is important for ensuring you or a loved one receives the support and guidance you need. For this reason, it’s important to identify the signs and symptoms of this eating disorder.
With orthorexia, you will typically cut out foods, sometimes whole food groups, from your diet in order to be healthier. This abstinence is total and unwavering, and the list of foods deemed to be unhealthy can expand over time, reducing available foods.
It is common for people living with orthorexia to adapt or reinterpret nutritional guidance in a way that aligns with and reinforces existing food rules, using health-based reasoning to justify increasingly strict restrictions.
An obsessive focus on food and eating can gradually crowd out other areas of life. Social relationships may become harder to maintain, and concentration at work or study can suffer as the preoccupation with food takes up increasing mental space.
The intensity of orthorexia’s fixation on ‘clean’ or ‘pure’ food can result in quite intense feelings as a result of eating unhealthy foods, resulting in strong feelings of anxiety, guilt, or shame.
Restricting the diet to a narrow range of foods can result in significant nutritional deficiencies, leading to physical changes including weight loss, muscle weakness, persistent fatigue, and a weakened immune system.
Orthorexia can be difficult to identify in its early stages, as the behaviours involved can appear to reflect healthy choices rather than disordered eating.
Early recognition is important, however, the sooner unhealthy patterns and beliefs around food are identified and addressed, the sooner specialist support can make a meaningful difference to recovery.
At ABBI Clinic, we believe that timely, specialist intervention matters. Our approach is responsive, flexible, and built around your real life. Whether you are in the early stages of recognising a difficulty or have been experiencing symptoms for some time, we are here to provide a clear, supported path forward, delivered with the clinical expertise and compassion you deserve.
Everyone’s experience of orthorexia is different, and recovery requires a treatment plan that addresses both the psychological relationship with food and the practical impact on daily life. Your plan may include:
Individual therapy sessions offer dedicated one-to-one time with a specialist psychological therapist. Sessions provide a confidential space to examine the beliefs and anxieties driving rigid food rules, and to develop a healthier, more flexible relationship with eating.
Group therapy brings you together with others in a structured, facilitated setting. Sessions focus on exploring shared experiences, challenging unhelpful thinking around food and health, and building the tools needed to reduce rigidity and reconnect with a more balanced life.
Family therapy involves you and those closest to you in the recovery process. Sessions explore how relationships and shared environments may be reinforcing orthorexic patterns, and help to create a home context that better supports your progress.
Working with a specialist eating disorder dietitian, you will gradually challenge restrictive food rules, reintroduce dietary variety, and develop a more flexible approach to eating that is grounded in both physical health and genuine enjoyment of food.
Supported mealtimes within our Day Care programme provide structured opportunities to eat a broader range of foods in the company of others, with your clinical team present. This can be a significant and positive step in breaking the cycle of food-related anxiety.
For all of our treatment progammes, a Consultant Psychiatrist will be involved in your initial assessment and ongoing care, particularly where obsessive-compulsive patterns or anxiety are significant features of your presentation.
Our mental health nursing team provides regular physical health checks and practical support throughout your treatment. Nurses are present throughout your treatment, monitoring wellbeing and ensuring your care remains clinically suitable.
Looking to learn more about orthorexia? Find answers to our most commonly asked questions here, or reach out to get in touch with a member of our expert team.
While orthorexia and anorexiacan co-occur, they are very different. You can be diagnosed with both conditions should you display symptoms of both, though the key indicator of orthorexia is the presence of stringent, obsessive beliefs about ‘clean’ or ‘pure’ foods.
At ABBI Clinic, we support you in several key ways through our tailored treatment plans. Sessions can address the negative emotions underlying your perceptions of food, provide nutritional guidance to enable a more balanced diet to develop, and support a more realistic and compassionate self-image.
Orthorexia can have several negative impacts on physical health, so it’s important that those who show signs of the condition get the support they need as soon as possible. As a concerned caregiver, you should talk to your loved one and reassure them that help is available. If you have any questions about the best way to do this, please contact us.
