Examining obsessional, eating, and health-related unwanted mental intrusions and obsessive beliefs in healthy and pathological orthorexia nervosa

The cognitive model of obsessive-compulsive disorder suggests that while intrusive thoughts are universally experienced, clinical obsessions arise from the influence of obsessive beliefs. Intrusive thoughts related to healthy eating are also reported in Orthorexia Nervosa, which has gained increasing attention in recent literature. Recent studies propose that Orthorexia Nervosa consists of two dimensions: healthy orthorexia and pathological orthorexia. However, there is a lack of research exploring the differences in cognitive processes and intrusive thoughts between these two dimensions. This research aims to investigate whether healthy and pathological orthorexia groups differ in terms of eating-related, obsessional, and health-related intrusive thoughts and how obsessive beliefs manifest in these groups. Accordingly, hierarchical and K-means clustering analyses based on Teruel Orthorexia Scale scores were performed and the analyses yielded four distinct orthorexia clusters. The sample of the study included adults between the ages of 18-50. In the present study, data was collected from 368 participants by Teruel Orthorexia Scale, Questionnaire of Unwanted Intrusive Thoughts and Obsessional Beliefs Questionnaire Short Form. IBM SPSS 25 program was used to analyze data sets. The findings revealed that healthy and pathological orthorexia groups differed significantly in terms of involuntary thoughts and obsessive cognitions. In particular, it was observed that the group with both healthy and pathological orthorexia dimensions used more intensive control strategies against involuntary thoughts and experienced these thoughts more frequently and disturbingly. These findings show that a transdiagnostic perspective may be explanatory in understanding orthorexia nervosa.