Introduction about the Eating Disorders - Research Paper Example

? Eating Disorders Your Psychology 04/23 Why eating disorders are on the rise in the younger generation? "HealthyPlace.com - Trusted Mental Health Information and Support - HealthyPlace." HealthyPlace.com - Trusted Mental Health Information and Support - HealthyPlace. http://www.healthyplace.com (accessed April 23, 2012). This website gives an introduction about the eating disorders that have been on the rise following the twenty first century in today’s younger generation and in children born after the millennium. As the world became a global village, the rises of McDonald’s and KFC’s junk food have become popular. What was ten years ago considered a birthday treat to eat dinner outside has now replaced regular home cooked healthy meals.‘TV’ dinners have now replaced the weekly grocery shopping. This all has led to an increase in the unhealthy diet that we feed our children for nourishment. Prepackaged food contains a high amount of calories, and a very high level of salt which leads to high blood pressure and other cardiac diseases. These tinned fruits often contain little nutrition and plenty of acids and salts to preserve it. By doing this the freshness and the proteins and minerals are lost during the process. So we are eating food that does not fulfill the needs of our body. Along with the lack of good healthy food, children today are extremely picky about what they eat. Salads are considered rabbit food, and hamburgers and fries along with soft drinks replacing water is what the staple diet of children have become. Eating a breakfast is no longer considered appropriate; rather crunching chips out of the vending machines on the way to class is perfectly acceptable. When you deprive a growing body of vital nutrients chances are that you are going to go binge eating because your brain will be ordering your body to eat. Another physiological fact that is important to remember is that the stomach is a muscular bag without any skeleton bones surrounding it. It does not have a limited capacity like lungs to expand; it will keep growing like a rubber bag if you keep feeding it. With the advent of the booming food industry pressure is on the farmers to grow more and more food to feed the booming popular. So foods like cereal, which use husks of oatmeal and marmalade which is made from the skin of oranges is becoming popular. Today psychiatrists state that they are three types of eating disorders that people suffer from these days; anorexia nervosa, bulimia nervosa and binge-eating. ‘Anorexia, a condition in which a child refuses to eat adequate calories out of an intense and irrational fear of becoming fat.’ –Adapted from Web Medical Doctors. This is a mental condition affecting teenagers and young adults in the prime of their life. The pressure to look slim has never been more so instead of turning to healthy activities to reduce weight teenagers start going on diets. Refusal to eat any meat, things with a high fat content is very common during this condition. Sometimes teenagers would refuse to eat a stomach full and would pick at their food and try substituting solid foods with juices. Some children go even further and refuse to consume any calories for the irrational fear of getting fat. Self-esteem issues contribute significantly to anorexia and more girls than boys are affected by this. How a person thinks about themselves about themselves is going to affect every behavior including eating habits, if a girl perceive herself as fat then no matter how thin she gets, she will psychologically see herself as fat. This maybe because a child might be chubby and got teased at school, so the complex in the child develops over time. This condition affects the more affluent class than the lower class and the Caucasians are more figure conscious than their colored counterparts. When an average person goes on a diet, the body starts burning the fat reserves it stores in the form of glycogen. When those lipid layers are exhausted, the body starts to break down muscle in order to continue functioning. Loss of muscle is very unhealthy and the person starts to look like a skeleton with each passing day. Unless a person is obese, the stored fats are exhausted in a week or two and then the person starts to feel weak and often feels dizzy. 0.3% of the males and 1% of adolescent girlsin the U.S. are affected by this disorder. Compulsive behaviors are often associated with people suffering from anorexia they make often show behaviors consistent with other additions and their efforts to curtail the amount of food they eat. Men who suffer from anorexia are not necessarily weight conscious like their women counterparts but it is mostly the side effect of some other psychological problems. When children in their teens go on starving diets it affects their physical as well their mental development. Some of the side effects of anorexia are heart-rhythm disturbances, anemia, which is the loss of red blood cells due to iron deficiency, hormonal and electrolyte imbalances and density of bone loss. Since the individuals with anorexia go to extreme lengths to ignore the symptoms in their attempt to keep their weight low that their caregivers need to be vigilant in getting them medical attention. Binge eating and going to diet so that one does not end up gaining weight is a disorder known as Bulimia nervosa. Those struggling with bulimia, are constantly battling in their mind to stay thin and on the other hand they have the overwhelming desire to binge eat. When a person suffering from these disorders goes on a binge diet, they consume three thousand to five thousand calories in an average binge episode and afterwards feel guilty about putting on weight. After the ‘binge’ is over, the person would suddenly start to panic and would feel the need to turn to drastic measures like induced vomiting, getting on the treadmill and trying to burn all the fat. It is important to know that the person feels very nervous about it and suddenly the fear of gaining weight sets in. Bulimia is not like anorexia, where the person trying to physically eliminate the food from the body; by throwing up intentionally. But people would try to make up for the overeating by going on crash diets and fasting for days. People with bulima go on binge diets just like that, sometimes when they are bored the hunger pangs increase until the person gives me, and once you start munching at the delicious foods then there is no stop to the hunger. A good way to control going on a ‘binge’ is to keep busy with some tasks that don’t involve being near the food. The vicious cycle of binges and purges continue until you get help for it. When a person goes on a diet, he is triggering bulimia’s destructive cycle. The dilemma here is the more you go on a strict diet, the more you are depriving your body of nutrition and then finally when your body in on the point of starving you will purge. When the person goes on a strict diet, the feeling of tension and hunger and the attraction to eat the ‘forbidden’ food takes the craving to a whole new level. Here the bulimic person might just allow himself a small spoon of ice cream and once the onset of the failure of the strict diet sets in, and then the bulimic thoughts are to just have it anyway. The relief by having some food in the stomach is pretty short lived and afterwards the guilt of purging sets in and the person is in emotion agony. What does not help in bulimia is to go on crash diet which would result in a weak feeling in the body since it is not getting the nourishment it needs to provide energy. The symptoms of binge eating are quite individualistic; like lack of control over eating, the person might keep feeling hungry until the point comes when the stomach is so full it becomes painful. When the person eats in secret, like sneaking off to the kitchen when no one is home or everyone is sleeping at night. Running off to a twenty four hour food joint in the middle of the night and wanting to eat alone and the person starts to consume large amounts of food without gaining any weight. If the person has a family, the members of the family might find numerous foods pack hidden in the store or something. That is a red signal that your loved one might be suffering from bulimia. When a person starts to alternate between too much at meals and in between meal times and then goes on crash diets that include fasting. It’s all-or-nothing when it comes to food. Living with bulimia, it could be a life threatening condition and your body is at risk that some of the organs might be affected adversely. The worst dangerous side effect of living with bulimia is dehydration due to purging. Vomiting and the intake of laxatives can cause an electrolyte imbalance in the body, when the potassium levels in body fall low and the sodium potassium pump cannot work properly. It can cause hallucinations, lethargy and cloudy thinking since the effect on heart of low potassium is irregular heartbeat. When low levels of potassium hit rock bottom it can also result in kidney failure. Other common medical complications related with bulimia include, weight gain due to the periods of overeating, abdominal pain and bloating of the stomach, swelling of the feet and hands, hoarseness and chronic sore throat, broken blood vessels in the eyes, swollen salivary glands under the tongue and swollen cheeks, weakness and dizziness accompanied by tooth decay and mouth sores, acid reflux and ulcers in the stomach, ruptured esophagus and loss of the menstrual period cycle. “Binge eating is an eating disorder where a person the person feels compelled to overeat on a regular basis.” (Definition adapted from the National Health Association of the United Kingdom.) People who binge eats manage to consume extremely large quantities of food in a given short span of time. They eat for the sake of eating and not just when they feel hungry. They often plan to treat themselves and even buy ‘special binge foods’. This kind of uncontrollable eating takes place in private with the person feeling that they have no control over their eating and afterwards they suffer from feelings of disgust. Some people use it as a stress reliever, and eat when they are stressed out. Binge eating is a condition that can affect anyone regardless of age, gender and class. The condition is more commonly detected in adults than in younger people. Binge eating is often taken a symptom with obesity; where someone is very overweight with a BMI also known as body mass Index of 30 or over. The side effects of binge eating are chronic and continue for the long term like hypertension which is caused by consistent high blood pressure, high cholesterol, type 2 diabetes, cardiac disease and worse it can shorten your life expectancy by a couple of years. Causes of eating disorders: Eating disorders can be caused by a number of varying factors from environmental inheritance to genetic heredity reasons and they are different biological, social and psychological reasons behind every disorder. Medical communities of this decade have been conducting research to determine if genetic factors have any influence in the development of eating disorders and the results so far have not been conclusive enough to find out if your genes contribute anything in causing an eating disorder. Some researchers have found connections that if there are either too many or insufficient serotonin receptors which are the pathways to help signal hunger pangs and stomach full messages from the brain to the body. If any of these receptors are over working or damaged then a person can eat way too much or way too little and think it is sufficient. Research has shown that environmental inherence can play a greater role in the development of eating disorders, if a family that lives together, and the parents or one of the siblings suffer from an eating disorder it is more likely that the other family members will be more prone to suffering from the same disorder. Hormonal imbalance has also been observed as a cause of many eating disorders in several studies. Some studies in mice have shown that if the hypothalamus is damaged and or the anterior pituitary glands which produce hormones can be linked to anorexia. However it still a hypothesis and no definite theory has been proved that it actually contributes to eating disorder or not. It is reported that in about fifty percent to of the cases when people go on starving diets the menstrual cycle is disturbed in the disruption in the period cycle was actually present before severe weight loss occurred and remained a problem even when the Body Mass Index was reported normal. Personality Types: "Eating Disorders; Diagnosis, Signs, Causes, Risks and Treatments at Eating Disorder Expert (UK)."( Eating Disorders; Diagnosis, Signs, Causes, Risks and Treatments at Eating Disorder Expert (UK). N.p., n.d. Web. 25 Apr. 2012. Read More