When it comes to talking about fitness, health, and mental health, eating disorders is a topic that cannot be ignored. Most of us have probably briefly learned about eating disorders in our health classes, but we might not even know that we ourselves are struggling from some form of one. The two main kinds of eating disorders that I will talk about today are anorexia nervosa and bulimia nervosa. These eating disorders are often taken lightly, as many people think of them more as just habits, but statistics now show eating disorders as a detrimental disease among people, especially in the western nations.
According to the National Eating Disorder Association, 61% of American adults are overweight with roughly 25 million men and 43 million women dieting to lose weight and another 21 million men and 26 million women who are dieting to maintain weight. This sums up to about 116 million adults dieting at any given time which is about 55% of our population. According to reports from the U.S. News & World Report, at least 10 million Americans are estimated to suffer from potential life threatening eating disorders. The report further estimates that more people are suffering from eating disorders, especially men, but are ashamed. The goal of this blog is to inform you about eating disorders as part of our mental health initiative and to hopefully spark discourse about this mental illness in our community.
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Before we proceed, let's define a few key things.
According to dictionary.com:
An eating disorder is defined as "any of various disorders, as anorexia nervosa or bulimia, characterized by severe disturbances in eating habits."
Anorexia: an eating disorder primarily affecting adolescent girls and young women, characterized by pathological fear of becoming fat, distorted body image, excessive dieting, and emaciation.
Bulimia: a habitual disturbance in eating behavior mostly affecting young women of normal weight, characterized by frequent episodes of grossly excessive food intake followed by self-induced vomiting to avert weight gain.
As stated before, eating disorders don't only affect women, but men as well. There was an episode of Degrassi where Toby tried to join the wrestling team and was put against Sean whose muscle weight was equivalent to Toby's fat weight. Toby lost and felt bad, so he began to take laxatives to lose weight. In later seasons, Katie was shown to binge and purge in the bathroom in fear of gaining weight again after losing so much of it. That shows that even after the weight loss, eating disorders can still affect a person mentally.
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Eating disorders can also affect anyone at even a young age. Let's use another tv show example. In an episode of Full House, DJ Tanner wanted to drop an excessive amount of weight after comparing her body to other females, such as her Aunt Becky. She stopped eating, exercised excessively, and constantly weighed herself, only to feel disappointed. She even put up photos of models on the fridge to avoid temptation to eat. One day at the gym, she ended up passing out due to her starving herself and working out excessively to reach her goal weight. At the end, she ended up accepting herself for who she is and decided that if she will lose weight, she will do it the healthy way with healthy eating and proper exercise.
Eating disorders definitely cause damage and can hinder a person's health goals. Some of the side effects include muscle loss, electrolyte imbalance, esophagus damage, tooth enamel erosion, gastric problems, dehydration, organ failure, or even death.
Fitness is a journey with lots of obstacles that you can and will overcome. If you or someone you know is struggling with an eating disorder, please know that you are not alone. Check out https://www.nationaleatingdisorders.org for more info or help with recovery.
Click here to read Stefanie's story about her battle with eating disorders.
Citations:
https://www.psychologytoday.com/us/conditions/bulimia-nervosa
https://www.psychologytoday.com/us/conditions/eating-disorders
https://www.bulimia.com/topics/medical-issues/
https://health.usnews.com/health-care/for-better/articles/2017-08-01/these-are-the-real-facts-about-eating-disorders
https://health.usnews.com/health-conditions/mental-health/eating-disorders/overview
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