Before you lose your Mind to Food

Food is everywhere. There are TV commercials of those juicy burgers in between shows, advertisement of the chicken leg on the walls on your way to the office, Home delivery numbers for the cheesiest pizza along with a photograph, and if not anywhere on your Mind. How do you plan your good times with your friends and family? You go to have lunches with family, you book brunch for Sunday, Saturday evenings are for the happy hour beers with friends etc.

Do you see a pattern? Food is the centre of everything you do.

Is food your Problem or the relationship you have with Food is a problem? Do you always see food as a boss of your life or as an enemy from which you need to keep a distance? When you treat food as any of these two, there is a high chance that you could be suffering from symptoms of Eating Disorder.

Types of Eating Disorder

Eating disorder is a mental illness that has major symptoms of Irregular eating habits and a severe concern or distress about body shape and body weight. It is a pattern of eating too much or too less leading to a loss of the person’s overall well being. Some of them are:

Anorexia Nervosa

An intense fear of gaining body weight, having low body weight and a distorted perception of actual weight. They use all kinds of methods to restrict weight gain like laxatives, vomiting after meals, diuretics, enemas etc. They also restrict the amount of food intake or exercise too much to lose weight.

Bulimia Nervosa

Bulimia is a cycle of bingeing and resultant compensatory behaviours like induced-vomiting to undo the effects of purging food.

Binge Eating Disorder

People with BED consume huge amounts of food in short episodes which will generally occur twice or thrice weekly. In this episode, the person consumes abnormally huge amounts of food and has a persistent feeling of loss of control.

Hence, Eating disorders have hardly anything to do with food. It is a Life-threatening condition; that is a coping mechanism for underlying emotional problems including a loss of self –worth, a loss of sense of self etc.

So, If you or anyone you know has these kinds of unhealthy relationship with food, Please seek professional help.

Learn More about Mentriq and Dr Prerna Kohli.