The dangerous consecuences of eating disorders such as bulimia, anorexia and compulsive overeating or binge eating, originated and influenced by emotional and cultural factors, is failed to recognize for the public and professionals because of insufficient information. The stigma associated with eating disorders has long kept individuals suffering in silence, inhibited funding for crucial research and created barriers to treatment. Eating Disorders such as anorexia, bulimia, compulsive overeating or binge eating include extreme emotions, attitudes, and behaviors surrounding weight and food issues.
If you are regularly feeling sad, angry, hopeless, bored or lonely and are using food to cope with these feelings, comfort eating may be a problem. In this case, it may be a good idea to talk to someone about your feelings and look at other ways of managing them.
The good news are you do not have to be captive to this anymore. You have the power within yourself to beat this and you will. Recovery may takes a lot of time and hard work, but in the end it is all worth it, you will finally be free and you will love yourself.
Education is one of the only preventive means to fight these diseases.
It is known that there are diverse types of stress which can have a devastating effect on the human body and health. Stress can be environmental, produced by very high or low temperatures, very dry or wet weather, or exposure to contamination; nutritional by eating an unbalanced diet, using poor or starvation diets to lose weight, or unbalanced food ingestion caused by eating disorders like anorexia or bulimia; or psychological, such as stress at home, at the office, at school, or social.
Any eating disorder is likely to upset digestion, which in turn can create digestive disturbances. The effects of stress are particularly manifested on your digestion. The most common symptoms of a body under stress are: diarrhea and constipation, flatulence, bloating, candida albicans (yeast that lives in upper bowel), and IBS.
In these cases, restoring the balance of healthy bacterial in the gut is essential. A probiotic supplement can be very useful.
Probiotics, called as well ‘good’ bacteria that help keep the gut healthy, are prepared by de process of lactic acid fermentation. The most common microorganisms, which are used to produce probiotics are Lactobacillus and Bifidobacterium.
Taking a probiotic supplement will improve digestive disorders and bring an important health benefits, and first of all is the first step in breaking this unhealthy cycle. You can taken them by mouth or added to foods
The National Prevention Coalition states that the American Academy of Pediatrics recently released a policy statement entitled “Identifying and Treating Eating Disorders”. The Academy instructs primary care pediatricians how to recognize the early stages of eating disorders and how to help young people who have eating disorders.
Specifically to prevention, pediatricians are encouraged to educate parents and children about nutrition and healthy eating and exercising behaviors, and to be active in community efforts to change cultural norms regarding weight and dieting.
Genetic and Biological Factors of Eating Disorders
The genetic factors which influence addictive disorders such as drug and alcoholism also increase the possibility of eating disorders. This brings a result of the fact that both excessive eating and fasting stimulate the network of interconnected neurons in the brain, in the same way as drugs do.
A useful concept to understand the mechanisms that control body weight changes is the setpoint, a biological process of human body. This concept is important for the genetic component to be in play in the development of obesity.
The setpoint is a kind of body weight thermostat that is set genetically and regulates weight by a complex feedback mechanism in an effort to coordinate the various activities that maintain body weight at a specific balance. That balance is known as the setpoint.
The setpoint raises or lowers body appetite and metabolism -the rate at which your body burns calories- in response to how much you eat.
This internal regulatory mechanism is very similar to the ones used by other control body systems to guarantee a steadiness of internal environment despite strong external environment changes.
Some mechanisms are, for example, the thermic adjustment system or the sugar adjustment of the blood systems, and the circulation of the blood control systems.
In other words, each time we try to alter our weight we in reality fight against the powerful control mechanism.
Because it is not possible to reset the Setpoint, the result will be that in spite of our efforts to maintain our weight at an altered level, the Setpoint will tend to take the weight back to the original values.
Serotonin
Researchers suggested that Serotonin, that is a group of neurotransmitters, set in the brain and in the cells of gastrointestinal tract, include in their functions determining appetite levels and sexual behavior.
In the central nervous system, serotonin is believed to play an important role in the regulation of mood, sleep, emesis (vomiting), sexuality and appetite. Serotonin has been thought to play a part in many disorders, notably as part of the biochemistry of depression, migraine, bipolar disorder and anxiety.
Theoretically, altered serotonin activity could cause anxious and obsessive behaviors and affect the control of appetite and in consequence contribute to a vulnerability to develop eating disorders as, bulimia nervosa, anorexia nervosa, compulsive overeating and obesity.
