Archive for the 'Eating Disorders' Category

While every parent wants to see their children eat a diet with plenty of fruits, vegetables, and whole grains, some children adopt a completely vegetarian diet.

Unfortunately, research has uncovered a link between children who chose vegetarianism and eating disorders.

A balanced vegetarian diet can be healthy. Children who have eating disorders they are trying to hide may adopt vegetarianism as a way of choosing a socially acceptable diet that will still allow them to use weight.

Researchers found that children who were currently or formerly vegetarian have used unhealthy weight-loss methods, including diet pills, laxatives, inducing vomiting, or that they had experienced periods of out of control binge eating. These issues were found less frequently in children who had never adopted a vegetarian diet.

If your child has expressed an interest in adopting a vegetarian diet, be sure to talk to them about their motives. Help them determine what foods they should include for optimal health, including healthy fats and adequate protein for supporting a growing body.

While vegetarians typically eat only fruits, vegetables and grains, pescetarians eat fruit, vegetables, grains, and fish or seafood. Lacto-ovo vegetarians eat fruit, vegetables, grains, and include dairy products and eggs.

Although not officially diagnosed or medically accepted term, diabulimia is a serious health problem and emerging problem in many diabetics.

Health experts predict that almost one third of young females with diabetes could be suffering from diabulimia.

Diabulimia significantly refers to those diabetics’ patients who decisively reduce or skip regular insulin doses in turn to lose weight.

Insulin therapy is a part of type 1 diabetic plan. So, skipping or changing the doses of insulin in order to lose weight is an extremely dangerous practice.

Effects of diabulimia

The side effects of insulin therapy or manipulating insulin from your body can be hideously dangerous. As a result,  normal blood sugar levels in your body increase and ultimately reaches to an unhealthy level.

When there is a surge of blood sugar levels in your body it will lead to dehydration, fatigue and consequently wearing of muscle tissue.

Gradually, you can suffer from long term complications of diabetes, which includes heart and blood vessel disease, kidney dysfunction, retinopathy and further damage as well.

Warning signs of diabulimia

• Low energy or fatigue
• Weight loss
• Signs of diabetic ketoacidosis like fruit scented breath [prevent diabetic ketoacidosis]

Are you worried about your emotional eating tendency? If you really want to overcome emotional eating tendency, first of all you need strong determination and you should be honest to yourself.

Emotional hunger is entirely different from actual hunger. You should be able to differentiate the actual difference between emotional and physical hunger.

If you don’t have any idea about these two types of hunger, here are a couple of clues for you.

Clues to identify emotional hunger

1. If you develop hunger suddenly or when you’ve betrayed by a friend, such type of hunger is mainly identified as emotional hunger.
2. Emotional hunger is often associated with feeling of guilt and shame. If you tend to eat more, particularly during emotional situation like extreme anger or happiness, it is nothing but emotional hunger.
3. Most of the emotional eaters typically feel empty and extreme hunger even after completing their routine meals.

Quick ways to control emotional eating

1. Change your way of dealing with emotions and try to limit your eating tendency whenever you feel depressed or angry.
2. Always keep healthy food in your house, so that even if you eat extremely at times, it doesn’t cause any harm to you.

Bulimia nervosa, if left untreated or ignored, can cause a host of life threatening and serious health complications.

It affects your nervous system and if persists for longer periods, it can cause damage to almost all organs of your body.

Be aware with these specific health complications linked with bulimia nervosa.

Long term effects of bulimia nervosa

1. Mineral depletion: When you have bulimia nervosa, there is a chance for most of the essential minerals to release out from your body, which can result in mineral depletion. As a result of mineral depletion, few important organs of your body like heart, skin and bones will suffer.
2. Electrolyte disturbance: Because of mineral depletion, electrolyte disturbance can take place. This is the most serious complication linked with bulimia nervosa that can trigger cardiac arrest. When there is a problem in normal functioning of heart, obviously it becomes difficult for the sufferer to survive.
3. Erosions of throat and esophagus: In bulimia nervosa, the digestive system of the body is also affected very badly. With excess vomiting and emptying of stomach, the gastric acid present in stomach come out and results in erosion of throat and esophagus.

Eating disorders can seriously cause both emotional and physical damage for you.

While many of you usually try to hide the problem, there will be few warning signs, which you must essentially give importance.

Early and appropriate eating disorder treatment makes your recovery easier task for you.

Eating disorder treatments usually involves nutrition education, family counseling, medications, psychotherapy and also hospitalization.

Actually, the treatment for this disorder mainly depends up on the type of eating disorder. Here are few treatment options available for any type of eating disorder.

1. Psychotherapy: This kind of eating disorder treatment can help you to learn how to change your unhealthy eating habits, monitor your eating and moods and also develops problem solving skills. So, you can explore different healthy ways to cope up with stressful situations. Psychotherapy also helps you to improve your relationships and mood. Cognitive behavioral therapy is the most common eating disorder treatment used to solve your eating problems.
2. Nutrition education: You can take help from your dietician or your personal health care provider to know more about healthy diet. Good nutrition education can help you to design a perfect eating plan to attain healthy eating habits and also healthy weight.

At best, misconceptions about eating disorders can be hurtful to people suffering from one. At worst, they can prevent you from getting necessary help.

If you suffer from an eating disorder, you probably use food as your weapon to deal with difficult and painful emotions in your life, which leads to plenty of health problems.

If you are serious about your eating habits and are determined to manage your eating disorder, learn all you can about eating disorders and dispel all the myths.

Common myths associated with eating disorders include:

1. People who are not overweight cannot have eating disorders

It is impossible to determine eating disorders by the size and weight of a person. Bulimia tends to affect an individual with an average or even above average weight. Compulsive over eaters are typically overweight rather than under weight.

2. Eating disorders are not life-threatening

If you believe that eating disorder doesn’t cause any serious health problems, think again. Every eating disorder can be potentially life-threatening, and need to be treated as such. 

3. You can’t have more than one eating disorder

Are you really concerned with compulsive eating? You will eat food more than three times a day and finally end up with a worry of over weight.

Do you know that the leading cause of obesity is compulsive eating or eating too much? To avoid obesity and its associated health risks, it is very essential for you to avoid compulsive eating.

When you have compulsive eating disorder, you can feel strong urge to eat large quantities of food, even if you don’t feel hungry.

Even, you can possibly make your compulsive eating habit as a source to manage painful emotions in your life. If you want to stay away from this dangerous compulsive eating habit, here are few ways for you to avoid overeating tendency.

Don’t skip meals!

First of all, determine yourself not to skip meals, when you want to give up your overeating tendency. Many nutritionists and health care providers suggest not skipping meals at any cost to avoid compulsive overeating.

Instead, you should take well-balanced meals thrice in a day. Even some dieters do well with 6 mini meals rather than having 3 meals.

Be aware with compulsive foods!

Overeating and then feeling anxious about obesity is more common condition for people who are suffering with bulimia nervosa.

When you have bulimia nervosa, you may feel trapped by this addiction like relationship with the food.

You will try to engage yourself in overeating and then try to reduce those extra pounds of your body by implementing various unhealthy ways such as self-induced vomiting or extreme exercising.

Bulimia nervosa is a serious eating disorder and also considered as potentially life threatening disorder. So, try to know more about this serious eating disorder.

Women are at increased risk!

Bulimia nervosa usually begins in adolescence or early stages of adulthood. Like anorexia nervosa, more often, females become victims to this potentially life-threatening eating disorder.

It is estimated that approximately 2% to 3% of young women mostly develop bulimia nervosa, when compared with one half to 1% that has been estimated to suffer with anorexia nervosa.

Many researches have concluded that about 50% of those who are suffering with anorexia nervosa can become bulimic later in their life. So, if you already have anorexia nervosa, take better care of yourself to avoid bulimia nervosa.

Do you think a lot about your body weight and shape? Possibly, you might be suffering with bulimia, a psychological disorder.

Bulimia mainly affects your normal eating patterns.

With this condition of bulimia, you can experience certain episodes of binge eating followed by purging of food and calories from your body.

Bulimia is also considered as unconscious disease that takes place without your knowledge.

So, all you have to do to overcome bulimia is know what you are doing in this real world. Focus on your health and eating patterns and work on those in which you are weak.

Here are certain ways to overcome this kind of eating patterns. Know more about these effective ways to maintain better health.

Replace your thoughts!

This is your first step towards overcoming bulimia. Whenever any thought of preparing for a binge comes in your mind, put an end to your thoughts and immediately think about something else. If you succeed in diverting yourself towards other thoughts, then it becomes very easy for you to overcome bulimia.

Are you following proper nutrition in your cancer treatment?

When you are struggling with any serious disease, providing adequate nutrition for your body is very essential to maintain better strength and also to maintain proper functioning of your body immune system.

Even though good nutrition might not cure your cancer completely, it plays a vital role in the treatment of cancer.

Most Common Nutritional Concerns in Cancer Patients!

Proper nutrition always becomes a major problem in most of the cancer patients. This can be due to many reasons. Some of the most major ones can mainly include:

• Cancer itself interferes in your regular eating and digestion process. You can feel difficulty in chewing and swallowing because of blockages in your gastrointestinal tract. This blockage can be mainly due to growth of tumor or interference with the digestive enzymes and hormones.
• If you are undergoing any cancer treatment such as chemotherapy or radiation therapy, you can experience nausea, vomiting, dry mouth and also swallowing problems. Accordingly, you can feel change in taste or smell of food, which can put off your good eating habit. So, due to these reasons you can lose your interest to take proper food at right time and lack proper nutrition required for your healthy lifestyle.