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Home » Lose Weight Fast » Do you Have Carborexia?

UPDATED: 18:05 EST, 31 March 2012

Cut back on carbs to lose a few pounds, by all means, but if you start to view white sliced as the devil incarnate and shudder at the mere sight of spuds, you could be suffering from carborexia which can affect your happiness as well as your health, says Charlotte Methven

My name is Charlotte and I am a recovering carborexic. For many months, I balked at the sight of a bread basket and couldnt so much as eat a piece of sushi without imagining that the little blob of sticky rice was somehow going to give me a muffin top. And I was not alone Say the word carbohydrate to a group of women and youll induce a collective shudder.

Not so long ago, to lose weight you simply ate less food. But a steady wave of trendy diets over the past few decades, from Atkins (founded in the 1970s and rediscovered in the mid-noughties) and South Beach, to the current favourite Dukan, have managed to convince us that the secret to a slim figure lies not in mere moderation, as good sense would dictate, but in adopting a low-carb diet. Where once calories were ruthlessly counted and controlled, now its potatoes, cereals, pasta, rice and bread foods that were once staples but have now been invested with evil powers and unceremoniously ejected from our diets.

Google carborexia and you will be directed to endless web pages devoted to a condition gripping eco-obsessives hellbent on reducing their carbon footprint. But the term has now also been adopted by the equally fanatical anti-carbohydrate brigade. We are fast becoming a generation of pasta-shunning carborexics.

On-trend sandwich chain Prt--Manger responded to the demand for low-carb fast food by introducing its No Bread Crayfish & Avocado sandwich in other words, a salad (and now a bestseller) and Waitrose followed suit when it launched a 125-calorie Lettuce Boat, a sandwich using lettuce instead of bread.

I am not proud to admit that I succumbed to this madness when my marriage broke up last year. I was so consumed by anxiety that I was unable to eat much at all, and my weight dropped to just over seven stone. Though I had never set out to lose weight, the feeling of being waifish was intoxicating. Because I was going through a hard time emotionally, looking fragile reflected how I felt. I didnt want to let it go. At a time when life felt uncertain, my carbohydrate intake was something that I could control.

And it felt great, most of the time. I adored never having that full feeling after a meal, and because I was still eating protein and vegetables, I usually had enough energy. Very occasionally I would feel slightly light-headed in the afternoon, and in a to-hell-with-it moment attack the biscuit jar (and afterwards feel very guilty). However, I have no doubt that had I carried on with a super low-carb diet long term, I would have started to feel less and less well. And psychologically it never did feel right. Once paranoia about eating these foods becomes a habit, it is a hard one to shake. Whenever I was forced usually out of good manners at someone elses home to eat carbs, afterwards I could almost feel them swelling in my body and causing me to expand. My mind played tricks on me.

This led to some strange eating behaviour. I would find myself tucking into roast lamb for Sunday lunch, but desperately pushing the accompanying potatoes to the edge of my plate, or picking the mushrooms out of a risotto, while leaving the gloopy pile of rice to one side. Breakfast was a particular challenge; with cereal, toast, croissants, muffins and more or less any other food typically associated with the morning meal all out of the picture, few options remained, and Id usually just have four cups of tea and wait for lunch. Ill never forget spending a weekend with two immaculately trim gay friends both self-confessed carbophobes and being offered a choice of a boiled egg (no soldiers!), natural yoghurt or smoked salmon for breakfast. It was a great relief.

Deanne Jade, founder of the National Centre for Eating Disorders, says that carborexia is becoming more common and is similar to the more widely known orthorexia (a compulsion to eat organic or biologically correct food). Both, like anorexia, involve a desire to control food at a time when other areas of life seem difficult to manage, as was the case with me. Both carborexics and orthorexics adopt healthy eating as a proxy for weight loss, she says. Carborexics invest these foods with all kinds of dangers so they represent all that is bad and wrong and then they can justify staying away from them and feeling in control. They go to naturopaths or homeopaths who tell them that theyre wheat- or gluten-intolerant, which they mightnt be necessarily. Its easier to deal with a demon you can control, such as bread, than having to confront real issues, such as family and relationship problems, which often lie behind our feelings towards food.

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Do you Have Carborexia?

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