Dr Libby Weaver.
Treat others how you’d like to be treated – I’m sure many of us would lose count of how many times we were reminded of this as children.
Yet many adults seem to throw this saying out the window in the name of urgency and efficiency in the frantic pace of modern life.
Thanks to Eastern philosophies – and common sense – we know that being kind and showing compassion is absolutely essential to humanity, but what effect does it actually have on our health?
Researchers from Stanford University have found that as little as two weeks of practising compassion with intention has a positive physiological effect on the body. It can lower blood pressure, boost your immune response and increase your calmness. Essentially, if it was a pill we’d take it. Not only does it have physiological effects, people who are actively practising compassion are happier and live a better life. It also has a significant effect on others, motivating them to be kinder, thus creating the ripple effect I’m obsessed with.
Encouraging people to sit quietly for 20 minutes a day and contemplate kindness or write in a gratitude journal may enhance production of the hormone oxytocin. Oxytocin is typically released at times of nurturing and eases anxiety and stress-related symptoms. It is also thought to increase our generosity.
But how do you practise compassion for the person who cut you off on the road this morning, your colleague who thinks blunt and abrupt is the only way to communicate, or your partner who still hasn’t figured out that socks and underwear don’t actually magically fly to the washing machine?
I leave you with this wonderful quote from the Dalai Lama. ‘‘If you want others to be happy, practise compassion. If you want to be happy, practise compassion.’’
Fbecause she was worried about being around unhealthy food.’’ In what Elliott says is ‘‘healthy eating gone too far’’. Where diet becomes rigid and rule-based, dietitians are increasingly seeing patients like Rachel. At her Wellington private practice, Food Savvy, Elliott typically has five to eight cases on her books. The condition has taken off in the past three or so years, when she first started seeing orthorexics. While they’re usually 17 to 22-year-old females, another cohort of women in their late twenties and early thirties are also becoming obsessive about clean eating.
First coined as an official condition in the late 1990s by an American doctor, Steve Bratman, orthorexia has Kiwi dietitians concerned that the healthy eating message may have gone too far. ‘‘People who are orthorexic believe that their diet is superior to anyone else’s,’’ Auckland dietitian Angela Berrill told the Dietitians New Zealand conference in Wellington recently. It was the first time the condition had been discussed among dietitians at their annual meeting, and Berrill says that’s because extreme clean eating is becoming an increasing health problem.
‘‘Superfoods are very fashionable but it’s a marketing term that is overused. There is no one superfood that we should live entirely off. We would advise caution around superfoods.’’
In her Auckland private practice, she and fellow dietitians see a growing number of cases, typically one or two new patients a week. Often, sufferers have experienced a previous eating disorder such as anorexia, and have a tendency to suffer from obsessive compulsive disorder or to be perfectionists.
‘‘The key difference between orthorexics and others following a healthy diet is that orthorexics have an anxiety or fear about slipping up, and they worry what will happen to them if their diet is contaminated.’’
One person she saw refused to eat anything that came in a packet, was scared of processed foods and would eat only a whole-food diet. Often people obsess over eating grass-fed meat and organic food.
While the World Health Organisation has recommended we should cut our sugar intake by half, Berrill is concerned that fruit and milk have been lumbered into the debate, and health fanatics are avoiding them.
While orthorexia is an emerging health condition with a paucity of data, overseas research found that 7 to 58 per cent of the population could be suffering from it. Based on one study, Berrill says the most likely sufferers were ashtanga yoga instructors, athletes and performance artists. ‘‘People who focus a lot on their nutrition and are striving to be perfect. One of the contradictions of orthorexia is that people might start out to be healthy and end up being malnourished.’’ Orthorexics often suffer from anaemia, along with low fibre, calcium and generally a lack of vitamins and minerals in their diets.
But at what point does concern about clean, healthy eating become a mental health issue? ‘‘One of the questions we ask is how much time a person spends thinking about and preparing food. Purity around diet is an increasing trend in health-conscious individuals fed by social media and the internet. Anyone can be a blogger about healthy food, and you have celebrity chefs and supermodels on restrictive diets.’’
In extreme cases, orthorexics rid the body of toxins through regular cleansing fasts too.
Elliott says Rachel has recovered and is now living in Australia. ‘‘Luckily, if you get on to it, someone can have a great future. We teach people to treat food as yum or yuck, rather than good or bad. We want people to have a commonsense approach to food rather than a rigid approach.’’
And she says that celebrity chefs like Pete Evans feed such fears, suggesting that just a mouthful of icecream can be damaging to health. ‘‘Any health or food claims that make someone a lot of money, you have to be very wary of.’’