Eating disorders are challenging to study, treat, and diagnose, and they are familiar. An eating disorder affects at least 30 million Americans of all ages and genders. These diseases vary, ranging from behaviours disguised from peers to popular misconceptions that eating disorders are a choice.
What are Eating Disorders?
Eating disorders develop as a result of substantial disruptions in eating habits. These might involve restricting one’s food intake or bingeing excessively.
These behaviours can be triggered by discomfort or concern over one’s body form or weight, hurting average body composition and function. For example, a person suffering from an eating problem may have begun consuming less or more significant food portions than usual. As a result, the desire to eat less or more becomes out of control at some time.
What causes eating disorders?
Early adulthood is a standard time for eating problems to emerge. According to some studies, onset can occur during childhood or later in maturity. Many teenagers can conceal these activities from their families for months or years.
Anorexia and Bulimia affect around 53.7 % and 11.4% of females at some point in their lives.
According to community polls, between 2% and 5% of Americans suffer from binge eating disorders in six months.
Eating disorders are not the result of a lack of will or conduct, and they are actual, curable medical conditions in which aberrant eating patterns take on a life of their own.
What are the dangers and consequences of eating disorders?
A person suffering from an eating disorder may suffer from various physical and psychological health issues. Many persons who suffer from eating disorders also have mental diseases, notably anxiety, mood, or drug abuse problems. Severe starvation, cognitive dysfunction, and heart or renal failure are physical severe health implications. Eating disorders, unfortunately, have the most excellent fatality rate of any mental condition.
What Exactly Is Anorexia?
Anorexia nervosa is a self-starvation characterised by a distorted body image that leads to limited eating and other behaviours that prevent a person from gaining weight.
Anorexia was first detected in upper- and middle-class households, but it is now known to affect all socioeconomic, ethnic, and racial groups. Most people involved (90-95 per cent) are girls, yet these percentages are changing as boys become more commonly impacted.
What Exactly Is Bulimia?
Bulimia is defined by uncontrollable episodes of overeating, known as bingeing, followed by purging using a variety of ways. Binge eating is defined as consuming substantially more food than you typically would in a short period, usually less than 2 hours. The binge-purge cycles might occur many times per day to several times per week. Other conditions, including addiction, anxiety, mood problems, and frequent bulimics.
Bulimia most commonly affects girls and begins around adolescence, although it can also affect males. Like drug abuse, anxiety disorders, and mood disorders, other conditions are frequent in bulimics.
What Exactly Is Binge Eating Disorder?
Binge eating disorder is characterised by excessive eating within a specified period, and more food is consumed than others simultaneously and under the same conditions. It differs from bulimia in that people do not cleanse their bodies of excess food through vomiting, laxative, or diuretic abuse.
Binge eating disorder affects roughly 1% to 2% of the general population and is more common in women than males.
Eating Disorders and Coexisting Diagnosis
When individuals are treated for anorexia nervosa or bulimia nervosa, eating is frequently only the tip of the iceberg, and a comprehensive assessment often uncovers co-occurring mental disorders.
According to a recent national study, individuals with anorexia nervosa showed a high proportion of concomitant mood disorders (42.1%), anxiety disorders (47.9%), drug use disorders (27%), and impulse control problems (30.8 per cent). According to the same survey, individuals with bulimia nervosa exhibited higher rates of co-occurring mental disorders: mood (70.7 per cent), anxiety (80.6 per cent), drug use (36.8 per cent), and impulsive control (36.8 per cent) (63.8 per cent).
Diagnosing co-occurring illnesses can be upsetting at first since it can make an already severe eating disorder diagnosis appear much more difficult. However, healing can begin when patients realise what they are up against—how each problem affects the other—and receive therapy for all of their conditions concurrently.
Combating Depression
Depression, for example, is exacerbated by eating problems and vice versa. Anorexia’s starvation and bulimia’s unpredictable eating have a deleterious effect on the brain, affecting mood and decreasing sleep, cognition, and vitality. In addition, eating disorder practices induce social isolation and take up a lot of time.
Patients also experience painful negative body image, ruminations about food and body, and shame and stigma, all of which diminish their mood and damage their self-esteem. Depression saps patients’ enthusiasm for treatment, makes them feel hopeless, and keeps them trapped. Weight loss might be a gradual suicide in the event of anorexia.
Regardless of the combined clinical picture of these coexisting diseases, treating both the eating disorder and the depression significantly improves both conditions. Patients can stabilise their eating disorders with therapy by restoring weight, establishing regular meals, stopping purging or exercising, and better managing their eating disorder’s psychological aspects.
When patients are eating correctly, the multitude of evidence-based treatments for depression (transcranial magnetic stimulation,medications, psychotherapy, electroconvulsive therapy (ECT),) work better, and patients have more energy and emotional space to find the meaning and enjoyment in life, which is essential to recovery from depression.
If you know someone suffering from an eating disorder, consult Dr Nivedita Pandey. In addition, she can help with obesity management and help people deal with eating disorders. Her expertise also extends to managing food allergies.
