EP. 3 - "ORTHOREXIA BITES" with guest, Jason Wood, thriver and author of "Starving For Survival."
Join the conversation as our own Eli talks with Jason about living in recovery from Orthorexia, a rare but damaging eating disorder.
[TRIGGER WARNING: We will be talking about disordered eating]. We learn more about WHAT it is and also HOW it impacts one's mental health. Jason also speaks to the stigmas prevalent with men speaking about disordered eating. He has taken up the call for advocacy as he releases his first book this year, with 50% of proceeds supporting the work of NoStigmas. You can find Jason on IG @orthorexiabites, and at www.orthorexiabites.com.
Be sure to catch new episodes every Wednesday at 2 PM Eastern for more REAL talk with REAL people. You can also visit nostigmas.org/unsilent to watch, listen to, and read all of our conversations this season. We are survivors, thrivers, advocates, and Allies. We see you. We love you. BE UNSILENT 💚
#orthorexia #maleeatingdisorder #eatingdisordermen #mentalhealth #mentalhealthawareness #mentalhealthadvocate #mentalhealthsupport #mentalhealthstigma #mentalhealthstories #mentalhealthstoriesmatter #suicideprevention #suicideintervention #mentalhealthallies #anxietyawareness #depressionawareness
SHOW NOTES:
Jason:
It was, you know, you could never eat healthy enough. We oftentimes, in general, we don't think we're enough. Well, in my case, it was the same thing. I didn't think I was eating healthy enough, which I thought made me not enough. So it was one of those where the lines were blurred.
Eli:
This is Unsilent, a Speak series from NoStigmas that champions mental health advocacy and challenges the stigmas that prevent people from getting the help they need. I'm Eli Lawson, a producer for the show. This week, I'll be having a conversation with Jason about his battle with orthorexia, a lesser known eating disorder. We'll hear about Jason's relationship with food, healthy eating becoming an unhealthy obsession, but we'll also get to see the power of making your mess your message. Thank you for being here. If you want to learn more, or contact us visit nostigmas.org. Don't face it alone. Be Unsilent.
Eli:
Before we begin, or kind of dive into it further. For someone who doesn't know very much about it. How would you describe orthorexia? Am I pronouncing that correctly?
Jason:
Yeah, you're pronouncing that correctly. And you know, that's funny because even my nutritionist and my therapist that I've been working with, I had to teach them how to pronounce it. They weren't even aware of the conditions. So it's one of those that we got to get out there and talk about. But to sum it up, it's basically an obsession and addiction to healthy, clean eating. In my case, my eating disorder was not fueled around solely body image or solely, solely calories in and calories out. It was about eating the cleanest, the healthiest possible foods. Oftentimes, we'll see fad diets become an obsession with people who are battling orthorexia. We have a tendency in diet culture, and just in society in general, to label foods as good or bad. And with orthorexia, it goes to the extremes. Most foods eventually find their way on the bad list and as the condition continues to develop and worsen, more foods get on that bad list, fewer foods are on the good list. And you know, by the height of everything for me, I was eating just a handful of food every day. It was the same type of food day in and day out, breakfast, lunch, and dinner, because I was following such strict food rules, because I wanted to be a healthy, clean eater. I thought I was doing the right thing by taking care of my body, but in actuality, it was slowly starting to kill me. I was diagnosed in July of 2020. And when my doctor diagnosed me with my eating disorder, it was diagnosed as an unspecified eating disorder. In the chart at the office, he actually had to put “eating disorder: other slash bulimia”, which I thought was very weird terminology because I had never binged, I had never purged, so why was there bulimia mentioned on my medical chart? And to me, it kind of sounded made up. And it was while I was reading this book that I stumbled across a term: orthorexia. I'm like, I wonder what orthorexia is. So I pulled out my phone. I googled it really quick, and it popped up this unhealthy addiction obsession with healthy clean eating. And it was a lightbulb moment, you know. It was probably 6am in the morning, but I was ready to dance on the table because it was just so powerful to realize that what I was facing was in fact an eating disorder and that it had a name. That I wasn't alone, that I wasn't just some weird guy with some weird relationship with food, that this was actually a serious situation. And that was the turning point in my recovery because it was then that I realized I do need help. I am worthy of help. What I'm facing is very serious. And that's also the moment when I realized I needed to start getting out there and sharing my own story because one, there's not a lot of guys with eating disorders that are talking about them. Two, there's not a lot of individuals with orthorexia who are out there talking about it. So my husband woke up later that morning and I was like, do you know what orthorexia is? Do you know what it is? And of course he had never heard about it. So then I explained it to him. I go to my therapist appointment the next week. I'm like, Do you know what orthorexia is? He had never heard of it. So I explained it to him, My nutritionist, the same thing and so on. And it's these conversations that I continue to have on a regular basis where people will look at me and, one, they ask how do you pronounce that?
Eli:
(Laughing) Sorry!
Jason:
No, no worries! And two, they don't know what it is. And it's just it's something that I think is a lot more prevalent in our society. But it's just we don't realize it's that serious of a problem.
Eli:
I was gonna say, on the surface that doesn't sound like something bad. It's like, oh, eating healthy food. But obviously as we'll get into more, it's a whole lot more than that. When does it become unhealthy? You said you're eating just a just a handful of food?
Jason:
Yeah, yeah. So my good list had shrunk down to the point where there was no variety in my diet anymore. Things like fruits and vegetables were starting to get cut out because if you search hard enough on the internet, or follow when these fad dieters, there's something wrong with everything. So you slowly start to add things and I think about it, you know, it's the fall right now. It's apple season. Well, at one point apples are on my bad list, and it's like, wait a minute, an apple a day keeps the doctor away, right? Like that's, that's supposed to be like the ultimate healthy food there. But in my mind, it had become bad because of the amount of sugars in it. And the carbs in it. So you get that mentality where you can find the bad in any food, and it starts impacting every aspect of your life. I think about social functions with my friends, I stopped going out with friends or I would avoid work potlucks or work events because I didn't know where the food was going to be from. I didn't know if the food was going to be on my good list. So I started you know, hiding. And I started when we go on vacation, I would obsessively plan. I would research restaurants, I would research menus, I would research nutritional information, and it just became an obsession. It controlled my life. Suddenly food was consuming me, I was no longer consuming it. So that's when it crosses the line. That's when it becomes a problem. It’s when you have such intense anxiety around food, that it causes you to kind of withdraw from society. You start to change who you are. Because in my instance, my eating and my orthorexia at the time, became my identity. That was who I was, this healthy clean eater, and I lost sight of who Jason truly is. I remember in 2019 when we got married and I went on my wedding diet, quote unquote, that was when or orthorexia really started to take off for me. And I remember in the aftermath of the wedding, the day after the wedding, we had a donut brunch for friends and family that had traveled in. And I couldn't allow myself to eat doughnuts at that event. I had one but the guilt was just consuming me. It was overwhelming. And at that moment, I was like, okay, this is no longer the wedding diet. This is my diet for the rest of my life. I'm going to have to follow these rules and restrictions for the rest of my life, where it was like throughout the wedding and the lead up to that, I was like okay, well, you know, I get to my wedding date and I'll be good to go. I can go back to eating a normal, less restrictive diet. But it was that day after the wedding that it kind of dawned on me that, no, this is not just a temporary thing, this is going to be permanent for the rest of my life. I went to a friend's birthday party one time and opened up the thing of vegetables and saw that there was Parmesan cheese on them. Well, I couldn't have Parmesan cheese at that point. So I put the lid back on and I was like, sorry guys. I gotta go. I gotta go home and I went home that night and I didn't even eat dinner. And I left my friend's birthday party early because the fear of that Parmesan cheese chased me away. As it started to worsen, and it was especially during the pandemic, during the beginning of the pandemic in 2020 when things really got bad. That was when my weight dropped significantly. I was cold all the time. It was one of the hottest summers we've ever had here in Denver, and I would sit in a hoodie with the heat on and it could be 100 degrees outside. It hurt to sit, it hurt to get out of bed. And while working out I would get dizzy. I could work out for maybe 10 minutes and you know, I feel like I was about to faint. It was just really starting to take a toll on me physically. Mentally, I wasn't thinking right. I was becoming very aggressive, very negative. It was causing a lot of fights with me and my husband or just me and strangers in public I would start kind of flying off the handle in situations and start yelling at people over really nothing at all but in my mind I was just kind of snapping. But my personality was starting to change because I had such a low nutritional intake. There's nothing wrong with wanting to eat a healthy, healthy diet and have a healthy lifestyle. In fact, that's kind of what my recovery has been about, is finding the balance. And I think that's one of the keys with healthy eating and with dieting, and the whole fitspiration trend that you see online and stuff, is we need to make sure that people talk about boundaries. And that it can go too far. You can take everything too far. If I ate something that was on my bad list, I felt filthy. I felt disgusting. I felt dirty. So it's that constant need for cleanliness. And that's oftentimes seen with OCD as well. It was you could never eat healthy enough. We oftentimes, in general, we don't think we're enough. Well in my case it was the same thing. I didn't think I was eating healthy enough, which I thought made me not enough. So it was one of those where the lines were blurred. I was literally killing myself to live longer. That is the situation I was in because in my mind I thought I was doing the things I could for longevity. In actuality, according to my doctors and my nutritionist, I was weeks, months away from a sudden cardiac event. My body was starting to shut down.
Eli:
I'm curious in your story. What was the turning point that led to your recovery. Can you narrow it down to an event or moment?
Jason:
Yeah, so I called it the pita incident. We had gone on a short little trip out of town but my initial plans kind of got sidetracked. And we had to find new restaurants to eat at. Well I identified a restaurant in downtown Cheyenne and we got there and I ordered the hummus platter. And rather than have the pita bread I had asked to substitute for fresh vegetables which is something we do quite often because, of course at that point, carbohydrates were the devil and pita bread was you know, I could not have that on my plate. Well the waiter was not able to accommodate that request. They didn't have any fresh vegetables they could include. I went into a tailspin. I got emotional, I got angry. I just wanted to go home. I looked at my husband and was like. I'm done with this trip. I'm just done. I want out of here. I want out of this restaurant. And it was in that moment that he raised his concerns. He took a deep breath and then he expressed his concerns about how restricted my diet had become and hid the eating habits that he had seen and the negativity he had seen in my personality. He remarked about how I had always been such a positive, upbeat person before, but suddenly in the last year or so I was turning especially negative and aggressive. It was the turning point. It was that moment that I was like I don't want to live like this anymore. I can't continue to follow these strict rules. I don't want to be this negative person. I don't want to feel this way. I don't want to be cold all the time and hurt all the time. And it was that night at that little restaurant in Cheyenne eating hummus and pita that it kind of got me started on my road to recovery.
Eli:
If you or someone you know is experiencing a crisis, please call the National Suicide Prevention Lifeline at 1-800-273-8255 or visit suicidepreventionlifeline.org for support via live chat. If you or someone you know is in immediate danger, please call 911. Other resources are linked in the show notes.
Eli:
Your experiences a man with an eating disorder has been kind of wrapped up in all these extra stigmas. Like, there's already the eating disorder but then now there's being being a man with that. Why is that so difficult for people to understand?
Jason:
I think a lot of it has to do with the fact that not a lot of people suspect men to have eating disorders. Now a lot of people suspect following a fad diet or dieting in general as being an eating disorder. It went undetected for a long time, even from my doctor's standpoint. I would go to the doctor's office and they'd be like oh, it's incredible! Your pulse is so low! Your blood pressure is so low! You must be like an ultra marathon runner or something. Which I would take as a compliment. I'd lie and be like oh yeah, I am. Even though, if you see me running, something's probably wrong because I just don't run! So you know, it kind of went undetected health wise, especially at the beginning. And my friends and family were the same way. They would praise me. They'd be like, wow, you’ve got incredible willpower. You're so dedicated to get to the gym and eating healthy and like, way to go, good job. Little did they know that they were applauding eating disorder behaviors. Because we weren't suspecting it. Nobody had even heard of orthorexia. Nobody suspected that a guy could have an eating disorder. I didn't even think I had an eating disorder. So we live in a society where men can't show weakness. Men have to be strong. They can't talk about their emotions. They can't talk about their feelings. And that played a major role in my eating disorder because, losing my parents at a young age, I was in a lot of pain. I was going through a lot of hurt there in my late teens in my early 20s. But I hid it. I suppressed it because I wanted to appear like the strong guy and I think, had I been able to have an outlet and get that emotion out, maybe the eating disorder wouldn’t have developed. Maybe a lot of those feelings that I was battling back then would have been able to be addressed rather than kind of linger until it got to the point where my life was at risk. And I think that there's a lot of guys out there who are feeling the same way. They're battling in silence because we've grown accustomed to social norms for so long with the stigmas and stereotypes around mental health and eating disorders.
Eli:
There’s certainly that, you know, men gotta be strong, tough. No feelings.
Jason:
Yeah.
Eli:
None of that. And I can imagine,particularly when it comes to mental health, what's so important is being open about that and telling your story. Because that's kind of what shines the light into something dark
Jason:
Exactly. And that's how we can confront the stigmas and stereotypes that exist is by sharing our own experiences sharing our stories.
Eli:
And I wanted to, to kind plug the book you have coming up. What’s the name of the book?
Jason:
Yeah, so it’s Starving for Survival. And that's been keeping me busy. That was a project that, you know, I say that it's been 35 years in the making, because it's my entire journey. But it starts as being that kid sitting sitting at a McDonald's eating a happy meal, and then it goes through the course of my eating disorder journey, and now recovery, and it takes you right up to the point where I'm at today.
As I started my recovery, and as I started writing the book. It was that so much of my life, so much of my childhood, things that I had done, the experiences that I had gone through, they molded who I was. In a lot of ways they fuel the eating disorder. So I figured it wasn't fair to just simply talk about the years where I was battling the eating disorder, people needed to know the background story. Oftentimes, I'll say that eating disorders are about a lot more than just food and in my case, that's definitely true. There was there were many other factors that played a role in the development of my eating disorder. And in order to do that, I had to be able to share my entire story. I had to embrace the authentic me. So going back to elementary school I was picked on for being overweight. I grew up an overweight child, and it made me very aware of who I was because I would walk into a room and I was automatically labeled as the fat kid. I didn't have an opportunity to let people see my true identity because they labeled me already. That's just kind of the way that bullies operate, and the way society kind of operates when we see people. And I became very self conscious about who I was and how I looked. Well in high school, I wanted to lose the weight. I wanted to fit in. I wanted to be like everybody else. So I joined Weight Watchers and I lost the weight. But the problem is I have an overachiever, perfectionist type of tendency or personality. And in Weight Watchers, of course, it's based on points. Well, I was like, Okay, if I stay, you know, 10 points under what they're saying I should eat then I'll lose the weight even faster. So at that point, that unhealthy relationship with food and unhealthy relationship with dieting kind of kicked in.
Eli:
Already. In high school.
Jason:
Yeah exactly. In high school. And after I lost the weight, the same people that were picking on me growing up were now praising me like, oh my gosh, you look incredible. Great job. Like, I'm so proud of you. Your willpower is awesome. Well, that became my crowning achievement. And I allowed that to kind of define who I was for a very long time. I'm sure it happens to you, but you know, you go somewhere you have an icebreaker question and they're like, tell me one interesting thing about yourself. Well, mine was always in high school, I lost all this weight and blah, blah, blah. That was that was my canned response. And I kinda I used that because I thought, you know, this is who I am. This is something I'm successful at. This is something I'm good at. Well after high school, I lost both of my parents during my teenage years. So after high school, I went through some very dark times. Financially, I was evicted. I faced homelessness. I've lived in rundown motel rooms. I've had a falling out with my family. I found the drugs and alcohol. I just had a lot of a lot of rough times in my 20s. Well, during those rough times, I felt like such a disappointment, such a failure. So I kind of returned back to healthier eating, to dieting.
Eli:
It was the one thing you could control.
Jason:
Exactly. It felt like I could control it. And it felt like I was good at it. So at that point, you know, that's kind of when the restricted diet started. Well, then fast forward to age 29, and my life's coming back together. I had met my husband at that point and things are on the up and up. Things are looking really good. And I had a close call with colorectal cancer. And that's the same disease that had taken my dad from me when I was only 11. And it really scared me.I was like, I can't die young. I can't pass away like my dad did at a young age. I can't leave my husband behind. And I was like, I've got to do everything I can to prevent disease. I just don't want that to happen to me. And that's when the healthy, clean eating really kicked in. So it was like this disordered relationship with food that had already started. And now here I was facing a disease, facing my own mortality that scared me and I wanted to find any resources like could to prevent it. So I started looking up Facebook blogs or internet blogs about healthy clean eating and all of these things that you can do to prevent colon cancer, and it became my Bible in a sense, where I had to follow everything to a tee because I didn't want colon cancer. I didn't want to die young.
Eli:
It really sounds like, listening to your story, the seeds were planted early on, very young. And then just watered and fertilized and nurtured, all the way on. Which is hard to hear. I’m so sorry you had to go through that.
Jason:
Yeah, you know, I look back and I could ask myself, why did this happen to me? And I don’t. Because it tested me and I went through some really, really tough times and some really dark times and especially with an eating disorder. But I came out a lot stronger. And now here I have the opportunity to be able to share my story and hopefully help other people who are going through the same things that I went through. So looking back, I'm not even sure if I would change a thing. I went through a lot of battles and a lot of struggles, but if I can make some good out of it, then it's okay. Watching Robin Roberts Master Class last winter, she talked about how her experiences, she's made her mess her message. And to me that was something that really resonated, that I could take the mess that I had been through in my life up into that point and make it my message, and do good moving forward. Well, I wrote my story out and then just like I mentioned earlier on with Stephen King, I read it back to myself and I told myself my own story. And it was from that third party point of view, that objective point of view, that I gained self compassion, self love. I was able to forgive myself for the things that I had gone through, because I realized that this person in the story was simply doing the best that he could the whole time. And he was enough, and, you know, I was cheering for him and I wanted him to get better. And then I realized that person is me. And that's kind of when it all started clicking. So this is the power of being able to write my own story that was through writing my own story, but I discovered the power of storytelling. And it could sound selfish, because some people will be like, Oh, look at this guy reading his own story and blah, blah, blah. But no, it is mainly a therapeutic experience and I try to write every day. I keep a little recovery journal with me, whether that just be a couple quotes that I come across or something that I read in a book that I want to write down, or what's on my mind that day. I just put a couple notes in my recovery journal. And to me it's powerful writing it, but it's almost even more powerful when I go back and read it later on. Just two days ago, I was sitting there kind of flipping through the pages and looking back at things I wrote over the summer and over the spring. And those things really helped put everything in perspective. It really helped with the kind of mindfulness and keeping me on that road to recovery.
Eli:
How can people like you and I and everyday people, help others who are struggling with similar things?
Jason:
I think first and foremost, we have to embrace our authentic selves and embrace vulnerability, and not be afraid to share. Share our stories and share our experiences, to share our insecurities and our self doubts. Just let it all out there. And that will help kind of shift that conversation. Because we need to confront the stigmas. We need to confront the stereotypes and I think in order to do that, we have we have a responsibility to get out there and to share our own stories and to share our lived experiences. It's one thing to read about something in a textbook or just read text in general on a website, but to actually have a story behind it, and a lived experience. That's the most powerful tool. And I think that can do a lot of good because I know it did for me. Early on in my recovery just through reading other people's experiences and reading their stories, I realized I wasn't so alone, and that I had a voice and I needed to share mine too.
Eli:
This is Unsilent. Thanks for listening. Today's episode is hosted and produced by me Eli Lawson, Lance Bordelon, John Panicucci, and the rest of the incredible NoStigmas marketing team. Special thanks to Jason for sharing his story this week and providing insight into a topic that many may not know much about. To go beyond the show, connect with us on social media, or visit nostigmas.org to learn more about mental health topics. Please leave us a five star review and share with others wherever you listen to podcasts. We’d really appreciate it. New episodes of Unsilent come out every Wednesday at 2:00pm Eastern time. Finally, remember that whatever you're going through, you don't have to do it alone. Be Unsilent. See you next week.