3 ms·
You could classify lots of things as 'unhealthy obsessions' but then you'd just have a group of disorders, it wouldn't help you treat them. Clearly even two kin
by cormacrelf 7y ago
You could classify lots of things as 'unhealthy obsessions' but then you'd just have a group of disorders, it wouldn't help you treat them. Clearly even two kinds of obsessive eating patterns are different enough to warrant different analysis. For example, there are a great many more practical ways you can act on ON than AN, and being health-obsessed might have less social stigma so the patterns leading to it might be harder to pick out as problems. If you want to treat these people on their terms and in ways that make sense, you have to drill down and deconstruct the specific phenomena.
There is a place for general obsession research, of course, but examining why people congregate around this one is obviously helpful to that goal anyway. What exactly about healthy eating makes it attractive to obsessive tendencies? The commonalities and differences compared to AN are surely going to be valuable.
We programmers like to abstract over things, but tons of good work in science involves just having a go at at one thing until it is better understood.