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Eating disorders and emotional eating in the current world is not just restricted to preteens, teenagers and young adults. Age, size, race, religion, gender, sexual orientation and socioeconomic status is no more a barrier for any disordered eating practices. The pressure to look good 24*7 and concerns about weight and shape can negatively affect lives of everyone, especially women. Not to mention, the hormonal changes that women undergo before, during and after menopause that brings both physiological and psychological changes. Luke Coutinho, Integrative and Lifestyle Medicine - Holistic Nutrition and Founder of PureNutrition.me helps us in understanding the effects, causes and treatment options for elder women with the eating disorder.
Adults struggling with eating disorders might suffer from anorexia, bulimia, OSFED, binge eating disorder, subclinical eating disorders, and/or orthorexia. Apart from these, dieting and body dissatisfaction (to have a thin body frame) are all risk factors for an eating disorder to develop amongst adults. Even emotional trauma, a difficult childhood, feelings of insecurity or an incident of the past (like sexual harassment) are also potential triggers of emotional eating disorders in adults. Not only fat shaming, but thin-shaming is also a culture these days. This can lead to low self-esteem in thin women and give birth to eating disorders like anorexia nervosa and bulimia, which causes a person to starve even while they may be underweight, or binge secretly and then purge. Do read about subtle signs that someone has an eating disorder.
The eating disorder can particularly affect middle-aged women: It s a sad truth that we live in a weight-obsessed society today, where culture overrides biology. Statistics show that women are 10 times more prone to developing an eating disorder than men. This profound discrepancy is owing to the changes that a woman's body undergoes during every stage of her life, right from teens up to menopause. The midlife phase of women is when physical and psychological transformations are at its peak. It s also the time when she attains a child-bearing age, so the fears of putting on weight or appearing plump and then once again getting back to the pre-pregnancy weight can play a lot with her emotions.
In a pressure to control bodily changes and lose weight immediately after delivery, women turn to crash dieting which is a good enough trigger to induce emotional eating disorders in the long run. A few commonalities that one can see in every woman affected with binge eating disorder are:
Eating disorder is also a mental health condition: An eating disorder is a mental illness with close links to depression and anxiety. Individuals afflicted with this disorder follow extremes. They will either starve to skin and bones or eat until uncomfortably full and then purge. All these behaviours can cause damage to the gastrointestinal tract and can lead to acidity, leaky gut, autoimmunity, severely low immunity and also stomach cancers in a worst-case scenario. Continuous purging can put a pressure on the heart and damage teeth and gums due to the regurgitation stomach acids. There are vomiting-induced potassium losses too that can increase chances of cardiac arrest and may also result in death. Anorexia nervosa is one of the worst eating disorders and the cause of almost 20% deaths of chronic sufferers because of serious and irreversible nutritional deficiencies. Because of emotional turmoil and erratic eating patterns, there is a serious hormonal imbalance which pre-disposes one to a number of other health conditions like insulin resistance, obesity, thyroid issues and polycystic ovaries, etc. Here's more on facts about anorexia, the weight loss obsession.
Almost all eating disorders, especially binge eating, and bulimia gets one into a vicious trap of emotional eating where episodes of eating are followed by a feeling of guilt. So much so that one tries to numb by eating more food and feeling worse. So, even though eating disorder could be a mental condition, its ultimately our physical self that bears the brunt.
Practical ways by which middle-aged women can cope with eating disorders:
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