hope your pets stay healthy in 2017
I almost didn’t blog this and felt guilty
Not risking it
hope ya pets even healthier in 2018
When I spend time on Instagram, I see a ton of #bodypositive posts and even some people claiming that they beat anorexia/bulimia through positive thinking. This is troubling because it creates this assumption that eating disorders can be cured simply by deciding to change the way one thinks. In fact, new studies suggest that our biology could play a larger role in eating disorders than culture plays in eating disorders. This means that it may not be as simple as changing one’s way of thinking and that it could be a lot more ingrained in our genes than we had once thought. For example, it is no coincidence that people who have eating disorders tend to have very similar personality traits. This could indicate that eating disorders, along with personality traits, is hard-wired in our brain circuitry. The particular temperament of people in the category associated with eating disorders includes elevated anxiety and harm avoidance, altered reward sensitivity, altered cognitive inhibition, and altered interoceptive awareness. Appetite regulation is a constant concern for those with eating disorders, and the same brain systems that control appetite are the same systems that play a part in impulse control. People who have anorexia have associated eating with anxiety and have determined that the reward that they get from eating food doesn’t outweigh the anxiety they get from thinking about the consequences of eating, causing people with anorexia to eat less and less because of the way they see punishment and reward from eating. In general, hunger is driven by one’s physiological necessity, which comes with a variety of physiological responses that trigger appetite. The inhibitory control circuit in the brain is what is used to decide to ignore hunger and override the reward circuit. Conversely, someone with a binge eating problem can override the feeling of being full and just continue to eat regardless of the physiological signals being sent by the body telling a person that they should eat or stop eating depending on the energy storages. In short, people with eating disorders may have a harder time deciphering their sense of hunger as well as other emotions because of how food isn’t associated with reward as much, there is a greater difficulty in controlling the inhibition to eat, eating or lack of eating is used to regulate emotions, and physiological cues that tell someone when they are hungry or full are ignored and overridden by the desire to eat or to avoid the consequences of eating. Finally, people with eating disorders can have a harder time dealing with state changes because of anticipatory anxiety, prediction error, difficulty learning from experience, and resistance to treatment.
One aspect of eating disorders that people tend to look over is the cultural influence on how people view themselves and how this may affect the prevalence of eating disorders in a society. Imagine a society that wasn’t influenced by social media, television, and other popular media that can alter someone’s view of beauty standards. It makes sense that there would be a lower likelihood that eating disorders would develop because without the pressure to conform to a specific beauty standard of being thin, there wouldn’t be as many people desperately trying to lose significant amounts of weight. Eating disorders and overall body dissatisfaction stem from internalizing the thin ideal and social comparison from the media and peers. Outside forces such as the media put pressure on the individual to lose weight to fit the ideal body type and psychological forces cause the individual to internalize the thin ideal in the first place. Studies actually show that media doesn’t play too much of a role in eating disorders unless the person has greatly internalized the thin ideal. Some personality traits that go along with the internalization of the thin ideal is perfectionism and evaluative control. This makes sense because the thin ideal would be seen as “perfect” in the person’s eyes, so in order to strive for perfection, they would want to strive for the thin ideal.
Eating disorders can be extremely dangerous because of the fact that it affects every system in our body and eating disorders have the highest mortality rate than any other psychiatric disorder. Eating disorders affect the heart by causing the pump to be inefficient, which, in turn, causes less cardiac output. Also, eating disorders cause bodily dehydration because of vomiting, not drinking, laxative use, etc. This can be dangerous because dehydration can lead to other medical issues such as low blood sugar and shock. Some possible neurological complications that are possibly irreversible can arise from having an eating disorder as well as psychiatric disorders such as anxiety, depression, psychosis, and suicide. The reproductive risks when suffering from an eating disorder include lower testosterone for males and infertility for women. Some potentially irreversible risks include height stunting and decreased bone density. In addition, eating disorders can cause anemia, immune suppression, and even pneumonia. When treated for eating disorders, some of the treatments include bed rest, cardiac monitoring, electrolyte monitoring, and an increase in caloric intake.
The more well-known eating disorders include anorexia nervosa (fear of gaining weight to a point of losing a significant amount of weight), bulimia nervosa (binging followed by purging behavior), and binge eating disorder (eating a significant amount of food larger than what most would consider average and having the feeling like one cannot control their eating). Some of the lesser known eating disorders include pica, rumination disorder, ARFID, orthorexia, amongst others. Pica involves eating things that have no nutritious value and aren’t considered food items over a period of time over a month. Rumination disorder is classified as repeatedly regurgitating food that can be re-chewed, re-swallowed, or spit out for over a month, however, the regurgitation cannot be caused by some other health problem in the gastrointestinal tract. ARFID (avoidant restrictive food intake disorder) can involve significant weight loss, nutritional deficiency, problems with psychosocial functioning, and possible need for nutritional supplements. Orthorexia is quite interesting in that someone with orthorexia has a preoccupation with the idea of clean eating- so much in fact that it controls more of their life than what would be considered normal and people with orthorexia are not considered healthy because they also show signs of nutritional defficiency. Lots of people with eating disorders also have other psychiatric disorders such as depression, bipolar, anxiey disorders, personality disorders, and substance abuse disorders.
I can see that through time, society as a whole has been able to change the way we look at eating disorders as we gain more knowledge about eating disorders and as more research is conducted on the subject. Back in the late 4th-8th centuries, people believed that if someone was starving themselves, it was because they had become possessed by a demon. While we know that there is no scientific evidence to prove that demons even exist, there are some aspects of this hypothesis that are true. For example, the demonic possession hypothesis was correct in the idea that it was not someone’s choice to have an eating disorder. Also, they were right in the aspect that the person dealing with the disorder has very little to no control over their own situation, possibly like how someone may feel if they actually were possessed by a demon. One of the more positive ways that we have changed in the way we look at eating disorders is that now we are a bit more sensitive about the information we share regarding those with an eating disorder. In the past, eating disorders would be reported about, specifically anorexia, because of how bizarre the idea of purposefully not eating was to everyone. Bulimia was also looked at much differently in the past as making one’s self throw up on purpose may not have been seen as unhealthy as it is seen in the present day. In the past, throwing up was seen as a way to cleanse the body and some doctors even prescribed self-induced vomiting as a remedy for excessive eating and weight loss. One of the possible reasons that eating disorders were looked at very differently in the past is because up until the 20th century, there wasn’t as big a drive to stay thin and focus on watching someone’s weight. Since society has changed, eating disorders are much more prevalent and have become a more researched topic than in the past.
