| | 2 / 6 Healthy eating gone overboard
Often, orthorexia begins innocently as a desire to overcome chronic illness such as asthma or to improve general health.
While it's normal to be health-conscious about our diet, some people have the opposite problem: "They take the concept for healthy eating to such an extreme that it becomes an obsession," explains Bratman.
In the case of orthorexia nervosa, sufferers become obsessed with what types of food they allow themselves to eat (for example avoiding fatty food, those containing preservatives or artificial flavorings or even those that are not labelled as organic food), and feel guilty if they stray from their self-imposed food rules.
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