Have you ever known a person who throws up after a meal or one who cannot help but keep eating? Chances are that she/he is suffering from an eating disorder. This kind of disease can ruin a person’s health and affects their personal life in the worse way.
Eating disorders include Anorexia, Bulimia and compulsive eating or overeating disorder.
A person suffering from this disease will have extreme eating behaviors such as:
- strict diets,
- obsessively counting calories,
- vomiting after meals and
- keep eating large quantities of food.
People with such disorders have wrong attitude towards food and body weight and have a distorted self image. These are one of the deadliest diseases today and a large number of people die annually due to eating disorders.
Who May Suffer from Eating Disorder?
The most affected section of the society, due to this disease, are girls aged 15 – 24, as they cannot take the peer pressure of looking thin. These are complex diseases which require expert professional help.
People having compulsive eating or overeating disorder have an unhealthy addiction to food. Such people have an uncontrollable urge to keep eating even after they are full. They feel completely out of control while eating and will eat more quickly than normal. Such an episode of eating will be followed by intense guilt and depression.
These people will spend a lot of time thinking about food and will plan and fantasize about eating alone. They will normally eat even though they are not hungry. They might also keep coming back to food throughout the day and keep eating small quantities of food. This disorder leads to obesity and unhealthy weight gain.
Health Problems
Medical problems arising from this disorder include obesity, depression, high cholesterol, heart diseases, diabetes, hyper tension, kidney diseases, stroke, bone deterioration and arthritis. These patients suffer from immense inferiority complex and low self esteem. This disease affects every aspect of their life – professional as well as personal.
How to Treat Eating Disorder?
There are lots of institutions which offer professional expertise to cure this disease. The treatment will include programs having group therapy, psychiatric help, lectures and workshops, behavioral therapy, nutritional education, stress management, body image workshops, spiritual help, recreational therapy etc.
These institutions have counselors, psychiatrics and physicians having expert knowledge of the field. Only thing required for curing this disease is acknowledging it and reaching out for help to family and friends, who can further help these people by taking professional help.
