It is estimated that over 50 million people worldwide suffer from eating disorders, some knowing their conditions and others not. Eating disorder is a mental health condition that interfere with the part of your brain that regulates satiety and hunger. When these sections of the brain are not working well, you may feel extreme hunger or may not know when to stop eating. Eating disorders are related to other mental conditions such as stress and anxiety. When one eats too much or too little, their physiology adjusts accordingly. In this case, too much eating will force the body to store excess food in form of fats around the visceral organs resulting in obesity or overweight; eating less than normal will force the body to enter a starvation mode where it consumes the stored food in the body and thus the person loses muscle mass and becomes emaciated or underweight.
Types of eating disorders
Eating disorders can be physiological or psychological, in that one can have poor eating habits because they are obsessed with their body weight or they have an anatomical problem in the centre of the brain that controls appetite. Some of the types of eating disorders include anorexia nervosa, where one eats less than normal amounts of food within a specific time; Bulimia nervosa, where one eats large amounts of food than normal rapidly within a specific period; binge eating, where one has episodes of rapid consumption of enormous amounts of food, episodes during which they don’t have control till they are uncomfortably full; pica, where one has cravings for non-food materials such as soil and paper; rumination, where one regurgitate the food they had eaten, chew it again and swallow or spit it out; and restrictive food disorder where one cannot consume a certain type of food because of factors such as lack of taste for it, smell or their colour.


How do I know that I have an eating disorder?
Eating disorders have different symptoms according to how they develop. One can know if they have such a disorder when they experience signs and symptoms that correlate to a specific disorder or multiple kinds. Some of the most common symptoms of eating disorders include uncontrolled eating, finding non-food substances such as paper, wool, and soil to be tasty, feeling lack of control over ones eating habits where they eat even when they are full or they don’t feel like eating even when they have not eaten for a reasonable period, being obsessed with exercise or certain body shape resulting in unhealthy eating restriction, episodes of purging, fear of gaining weight and low self-esteem which is associated with body shape and weight.


How can I prevent it/ is it treatable?
Eating disorders are a threat to a healthy living and should be managed before they cause serious damage to the victims. Some remedies can be used to treat eating disorders which include psychotherapy and appetite regulation medication. Other means can be laboratory testing such as brain scans to rule out anatomical anomaly which could be causing the eating disorder. If one detects any signs of an eating disorder, they should seek medical attention before it is too late.
Eat healthy, not less!


* The author is a consultant in Public Relations and Personality Types. Instagram: @Tipsbyhalahill