Vegan Bodybuilding & Fitness

Yeah my husband has RLS too. It keeps him up for days and days sometimes. He tries to control it through diet so he doesn't have to take medication, but I've seen him suffer from it and it's not pretty.

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vegan for the win!

Sure everyone has the symtoms that the drugs are being used to treat, but the question is why is the state of health so bad that people have all these issues?

ok, ok. orthorexia is real. and is a real problem for people. and that is the difference between what everyone here is talking about and the real deal. yes, the description is vague and thats unfortunate. but orthorexia isnt just wanting purity or even being extreme about eating healthy foods. its and OBSESSION, much like OCD, etc. the problem comes in when it iterferes with your daily life. it cripples you from doing much else. you literally FEAR foods. i understand, believe me, that there is some scary stuff in some "food" nowadays, but its a real fear, as in petrified of eating a saltine cracker. someone wanna say that this wouldnt be a serious issue if it was your life? of course it would. its a mental disorder like anorexia, like o.c.d, like hypocondria, like people that are scared to death of heights. unfortunately there are varying degrees of everything and people think that wanting to eat as healthy as possible is orthorexia, and it is not. wanting to eat as healthy as you can is awesome. fhaving panic attacks if you eat a conventionally grown apple is not. get it?

if i didnt know about it firsthand, the article would piss me off too. but having seen it, i can tell you, it is a serious problem for some.

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the beginning is always today.

She's right: it is real but the description in the article sucks. I've heard about health freaks that were eating only foods with high concentration of vitamins, so one woman arrived to the doctor with her palm hands and skin all orange because she was eating way too many carrots, a guy got an overdose of vitamin D or E and was hospitalized for months and then it took 2 years for his body to fully detox. Those are the consequences on physique but the psychologic issue is 24/7. I myself at some point started to be freaked out by what's in food but it only grew in my mind and never became real. I may be wrong but I think those that have orthorexia give supernatural powers to food (like most nutritionists, dieteticians and scientists do) about the vitamins, antioxydants, omega-3 and all other micronutrients found in each food and their respective effect and healing/protective powers against cancers and other diseases...

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"Do your best, don't worry, be happy" - Meher Baba

Sure it's real, but the article is painting it with such a large brush, and i'm allso seen a TV show about it. Basically what the message was was eat heathy food but eat other stuff too because it's not bad for you and won't kill you.

Personnally I dont really like when they try to confort people like this; truth is that IT IS BAD for us and not necessary at all -- if it was necessary to eat junk even if it bad, then there would be no reason to not avoid it, it would be a necessary evil, but its not. So in articles, they encourage us to become vegetarian or even to go vegan, but they always say: go one step at a time. But I believe it often fails this way; people are making one exception to the rule, and one more, etc and then they fall off the wagon and go back to their omni diet. If you do it overnight you cannot go back; if you go back you didn't make the change. They tell us to eat healthy but then they write articles like the one in this post, saying its a disease to eat too much healthy and that one must include some junk food. They do this perhaps because they know that most people are losers unable to make radical changes so they say: its ok to change just a bit, but keep some of your bad habits.

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"Do your best, don't worry, be happy" - Meher Baba

Yep i agree. Bad things are best never done. Getting into a car wreck might not kill you but it's easiler to avoid it. Dirving 100 on the freeway won't make you crash all the time, but your chances are much higher

Thanks for that explanation. It's like how having a fear of heights is sensible and all of us have some level of it, to prevent us from falling to our deaths. But if the fear becomes unreasonable for the risk and starts to interfere with a person's life, it becomes a diagnosable problem.

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My 2012 Training Log

Driving or riding in a car, at any speed, can result in a car wreck. Yet people get in cars all the time--would you say it's best for everyone to abandon cars completely because being in one increases the risk of a car wreck? My risk of being run over is much higher if I go near a road. Maybe I should never go near one. My chances of another person harming me is higher if I leave my house, so maybe I should stop doing that.

There's risk in the world. It's good to be aware of that and not take too many, but we can't avoid them all, so we always have to determine which risks are 'worth it' and which aren't. I used to mountain bike and now I do roller derby, which increase my risk of injury. But I do it anyway. Maybe this is a 'bad thing' that never should be done because it carries a risk of harm, but I don't care. It gives me enjoyment and I have weighed that this outweighs the risk for me, personally.

Eating cake and cookies now and then isn't going to break my leg or cause me to drop dead tomorrow. It's probably going to have negligible effect on my health overall. So why worry about it so much? Just like getting in a car, crossing the street, or playing roller derby, there might be some small risk attached to it, but it's not enough to make me consider it to be something so horrible it can never be done.

I can understand people who say that they won't allow themselves one cookie because they know themselves and they know that if they allow themselves one, they won't be able to stop and their entire diet will soon decline. I can't understand people who think that the actual act of eating a single cookie is harmful enough in and of itself to be worried about.

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My 2012 Training Log

Perhaps not
just one but lets say one per week, which isn't so many... but that's 52 per year so after 30 years that's over 1,500 cookies. Of course people that eat cookies often eat chips also, etc... Nowadays there young folks of 20 years of age getting cancer ? how come so young? there's girls that got skin cancer after just a few hours in the tanning salon. Or maybe the ultra-violet rays were not the only reason, but one cookie was ''the straw that broke the camel'' ( ahah, not so sure if this makes sense, but its an automatic translation from an expression used in French)...you're gonna say I'm being paranoid, but maybe not: add one cookie to all the scum in the air, and all the other risk factors you mentioned in your post... so its better to remove all the risks you can remove, like all the risks related to diet and lifestyle, so that there is only 50% left, things you cannot really change... Not so long ago, it was pretty rare to get a cancer before the age of 40 or something. But now, there,s even KIDS that have diabetes and even are born with diabetes, or 9 years old children with serious brain tumors... at this young age they didn't have the time to eat 1,500 cookies yet, so how come? you will say maybe because of their genetics... maybe because their parents ate only one cookie per week, only 2,000 cookies in their lifetime...

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"Do your best, don't worry, be happy" - Meher Baba

People can take anything and make it unhealthy. The article, unfortunately just paints this broad brush that it labels afflicted anyone who is aware of and concerned about what they put into their body. At least that was my take away.

Many of us in the modern world need cars to do what we need to do, but we don't need to drive recklessly which would up the chances of getting into trouble. We also need to eat, but eatting poor food doesn't do anything postive at all, all it does is temps us to more poor food. I've never tried a drug in my life and wouldn't ever even try any becasue if i like it then i have to deprive myself of something i like. Same with a cookie or other junk food, of course i'll like the cookie so i'll only be teasing myself with one cookie

I don't need to do roller derby, but it enhances my life, so it's worth the small risk it brings with it.

I imagine lots of us are like that. We do some things that carry risk because they make life enjoyable, not because they are necessary.

I'm not aware of any evidence that eating foods like cookies on occasion has a negative effect on one's health, assuming one is also eating a variety of veg, grains, legumes, fruit, and so on and meeting one's nutritional needs through whole foods. Eating some cake in addition to that has basically negligible risk.

Also, eating these 'poor' foods does do something positive. They taste good! Eating a cupcake makes me happy--that's something positive! It's even positive for the body for us to do things that make us happy.

I completely agree that we shouldn't base our diets on nutritionally poor foods. But I don't see the harm in eating poor foods within an otherwise varied and healthful diet. Food is not purely a digestive, metabolic function. Food can be part of socializing. Food can be enjoyed for its taste. Worrying purely about what happens when your body takes in a digests food, and discounting all the other functions food can have in the lives of humans is kind of like reducing us to machines rather than the complex social animals we are.

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My 2012 Training Log

It depends on the kinda of person you are. If your the kinda of person that can eat perfect and once a while you eat a little junk then it's no big deal, but the majority of people can't do that. Very few people run into problems doing Meth once a year or herion or whatever, but the problem is alot of people try it and love it and then justifly doing it over and over. I can only imgaine how easy it would be to eat healthy if that is what you grew up on and never exposed to the junk. I know a guy that was rasied on a all organic macrobiotic diet and he still eats like that. He eat some junk when he got older, but he perfers the taste of the natural food. it's just many of are sences are corrupted

There's no point comparing cookies to heroin. Heroin is highly addictive, and if you do get addicted to it, it can ruin your life (as in cause you to lose your job, friends, home, etc.), not just make your diet less than ideal.

Seriously, cookies and cake aren't going to kill you. They aren't going to ruin your life. Seeing cookies as akin to herion is blowing things completely out of proportion.

Again, I agree that it's great to aim for a good diet. But a good diet can include nutritionally poor foods. And I don't mean just once a year--we can eat much more junk than that. If you focus on what you do eat and make sure that you get your veg and other good stuff, go ahead and have the cookies as well!

Sure, there are some situations when a person who is trying to make a big change in their diet might need to cut out all junk in order to realign their taste buds so they can start to taste the more subtle flavours of real food and come to enjoy it. But most of us aren't in that situation.

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My 2012 Training Log