Would you be upset with yourself for eating a slice of birthday cake at a party?

Are you uncomfortable eating food someone else has prepared because you aren’t in control of the ingredients?

Do you beat yourself up or become depressed after a day of unhealthy eating choices?

According to Brad Pilon, nutrition expert and author, these could be signs of “Obsessive Compulsive Eating Habits” a term he has coined for going to extremes in the pursuit of a diet that’s supposed to be good for you.

In his book, Eat Stop Eat: The Radical New Approach to Nutrition That Can Burn Fat, Improve Your Health and Might Just Save Your Life, he makes the case that the quest for healthy food can become a disease in its own right, and almost as damaging as the diseases it is meant to fight.

A person with obsessive eating habits worries too much over food quality, trying endlessly to perfect his or her diet. Just trying to follow a healthful diet doesn’t make a person diagnosed with an eating disorder. Rather, it is the concept of “transferring too much of life’s meaning onto food that makes obsessive eating an eating disorder,” writes Brad Pilon.

“If you simply eat healthy food but don’t give it more of a place in your life than it’s really due, you have a good diet. But when you use food to drain away the energy from other parts of your life, you are damaging your soul.”

So why do some people get so hooked on healthy eating?

Pilon points out a number of examples where people who follow extreme “healthy” diet behaviors may really be using them as hidden agendas to cover up more disturbing problems.

For example, perhaps following a macrobiotic diet, which involves eating grains as a staple food and includes secondary choices such as vegetables and beans, and avoiding the use of highly processed or refiend foods, is really a way to try to organize the chaos of everyday life by exercising strict control in one area.

Or maybe a supposed food allergy that calls for the avoidance of dozens of foods takes over someone’s life to the extent that he or she isolates himself from other people, using the severely strict diet as a cover for the fact that they’re afraid of the outside world.

It has been suggested by Pilon and others that some people have gone to such extremes to eat healthfully that they may be candidates for clinical treatments such as psychotherapy. But for others, it may be enough to admit you’re trapped in a strict eating pattern and work to recognize your own hidden agendas and underlying reasons for your behavior.

For those flying solo without clinical intervention, Pilon suggests trying to find a middle ground of taking slow steps toward more moderate eating.

“The most important thing is to go easy on the guilt” that is produced by trying to follow a diet to the nth degree, he says. “You have to loosen up a bit, and that includes giving yourself space to make some mistakes.”

Although the advice sounds all to common and simple, it’s about raising awareness and could help someone who wants to follow a healthful lifestyle but avoid falling into the obsessive compulsive eating traps.

To learn more about the dangers of obsessive eating check out our free nutrition report “The Dirty Dozen: The 12 Most Obsessive Compulsive Eating Habits and How to Break Them!”. For a full review of the Eat Stop Eat program, with testimonials and how fasting improves your health, click here.

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