I mean, I was technically raised orthorexic and have technically been orthorexic all my life.
Where food came from, what was in it, how it was produced, how were all big parts of growing up
This isn't meant to be insensitive or to minimise the issues around an industrial diet that effect many people.
Broscience incoming:
Eat what would be considered an ultra clean diet (but which is actually optimal). Eat the same volume as you normally would basically, it's not about losing weight. It can be done extremely cheaply and the wide options available are extremely tasty imo. You will cook a lot and bring food with you in lunchboxes. There's still probably room for blowouts if you can maintain for 90% of the time.
After a few months or a year your overall health and insulin response will have improved, your sense of hunger and sweetness will have changed, as well as your understanding of satiation. You may find that getting to and maintaining the weight you want becomes much less of a stress.
To be specific, ultra clean from my perspective means, apart from the obvious things:
replacing corn/pasta/wheat/potato with chickpeas/lentils/mungbeans/pintobeans/pulses_to_infinity/oats/ground_linseed/ground_hempseed/endlesss_options
replacing any solvent extracted oils, like canola, with mechanically extracted oils like olive
replacing anything processed (meat or vegetables) with cheaper unprocessed wholefoods you've cooked yourself.
Hope this doesn't sound like a smugpost, it's not meant that way.
Fully agree that if great anxiety or physical illness happen when you think about any food it's a big problem.
I think that could be overstating it though.
People's perception of what actually constitutes food and what is health has been twisted by decades of capitalist messaging.
A doctor I'm aware of here, who I'd say treats the children of helicopter parents, tells the story of parents coming to her extremely worried that their kids were underweight, even though the diet was extremely healthy. She had to show the parents pictures of skinny active healthy kids from the 50s to convince them that it was normal, that their perception of chubby healthy kids was wrong.