Water’s Edge Counseling & Healing Center is committed to helping individuals throughout St. Cloud, Minnesota find hope and reclaim their lives as they navigate their eating disorder challenges.
A LIFESTYLE CHOICE, OR A MENTAL ILLNESS?
Ask this question, and many will tell you that common eating disorders like anorexia nervosa, bulimia nervosa, and binge-eating disorder are lifestyle choices. That couldn’t be further from the truth. Across all ages, genders, racial/ethnic backgrounds, and body weights, eating disorders are complex bio-psycho-social illnesses harmful to the sufferer’s emotional and physical growth and productivity. They commonly occur alongside other mental health conditions like anxiety, trauma, and depression.
WHAT ARE THE CAUSES OF EATING DISORDERS?
Eating disorders don’t merely develop out of nowhere.
For individuals in St. Cloud, Minnesota, and all over for that matter, many contributing factors create the perfect environment for eating disorders to come into being and thrive.
These factors include:
Genetics: Gene inheritance has been identified as one of the leading causes of eating disorders. Studies centered on adoption and monozygotic/fraternal twin relationships confirm this.
Culture & Society: The communities people live in often influence how they view weight and how they believe they should be seen from a weight perspective. This is true not only here in the Twin Cities and St. Cloud, Mn, but throughout the entire United States. Perceptions that put thinness on a pedestal, or assert a preference for smaller bodies, often sway the community’s opinions away from medical facts about eating disorders. Societal influence exerts a strong pull as well. Pressures can include peer influence, influence from the environment, and even influence from the next-door neighbor.
Media: From the pages of popular magazines to the ads we see on TV, online and offline, there are bold and subtle references about thinness being admired. As a result, this leads to certain eating disorders in those who feel they do not match up to this oft-promoted weight measure.
Personality: Certain personality characteristics like a leaning to perfectionism or a constant strong urge to eat or avoid food for long periods of time are also causes of eating disorders.
CONTROL IS A KEY FACTOR
For many who are struggling with eating disorders, here in St. Cloud, Minnesota and beyond, what they’re trying to control is how they experience the world in terms of activation, distress, safety, etc. When we understand this, we’re able to better walk with people who are experiencing eating disorder symptoms. Their struggle is not driven by vanity, although vanity can be part of an ED’s external appearance. The vanity is likely more about wanting to appear to have things together, to appear not affected when one is actually overwhelmed and struggling internally.
Therefore, the treatment of eating disorders is not just about reducing symptoms. Symptom reduction is an essential aspect of treatment, but it’s also about increasing a sense of identity, purpose, and hope – in the self, others, God, and the world. It’s also about figuring out what it looks like and means to be safe in the world, physically, emotionally, sexually, spiritually, relationally, etc.
IMPLICATIONS OF EATING DISORDERS
Water’s Edge Counseling & Healing Center is committed to helping individuals in St. Cloud, MN and the Twin Cities overcome their eating disorders. Beyond the emotional and physical negative consequences of eating disorders, exploring a bit deeper overcovers the following side effects:
- A decrease in heartbeat per minute over time.
- As a direct result of a slower heartbeat per minute, the body’s essential organs receive less than the required amount of oxygen they need to function. This could lead to memory loss, dizzy spells, and co.
- The heart becomes inefficient in its primary responsibility of pumping blood.
- Increased exposure to gum disease.
- The teeth become weak because of lack of calcium, and there may be a change in color from white to off-white, or worse.
TYPES OF EATING DISORDERS
Types of Eating Disorders
Within St. Cloud, Minnesota, and throughout the Twin Cities, eating disorders associated with food can take on many forms and show up on both spectrums, underweight and overweight.
Before sharing details on some of the most common eating disorders, here is a list to guide you:
- Bulimia Nervosa
- Binge Eating Disorder
- Anorexia Nervosa
- Night Eating Syndrome
- Pica
- Purging Disorder
- Rumination Disorder
- Avoidant/Restrictive Food Intake Disorder
Bulimia Nervosa
This eating disorder is an all-consuming desire to repeatedly eat large portions of food, followed by certain counterbalancing behaviors aimed at canceling out the lack of control exercised in the episode. Patients who suffer bulimia nervosa are often normally weighted or over-weighted (because of the inordinate quantity of food consumed). Some of the counterbalancing behaviors exhibited by patients who have bulimia nervosa include exercise routines that are unwarranted, self-induced vomiting, and fasting.
Binge Eating Disorder
This is one of the most common eating disorders, and it typically gives rise to being overweight, and it is prevalent throughout the United States. If this eating disorder and the bulimia nervosa were siblings, they would be twins, but not identical. Those with bulimia nervosa counterbalance their consumption of large portions of food with certain behaviors, for example, exercise or vomiting. Those with binge eating disorder consume large portions of food within a brief timeframe, but they do not compensate for this uncontrolled food spree behavior in any way.
Anorexia Nervosa
Anorexia nervosa is an eating disorder where those affected by it limit the variety of food they consume and how many calories they consume in their meals. Many people associate anorexia nervosa with a skinny frame, but physical appearance does not tell the real story about this eating disorder. Not all anorexic patients are underweight or thin.
Like bulimia nervosa, patients with anorexia nervosa embrace counterbalancing activities like binge eating, unjustifiable exercise, purging through vomiting, and the use of laxatives. Though its frequency is dominant in teenagers, it also occurs in growing children as a weight deficiency.
Rumination Disorder
People who suffer from Rumination Disorder have to bring food back up and into their mouth continually. When the food is brought back up, it is either spewed out of the mouth or repeatedly chewed before being let back into the stomach. For the most part, if the regurgitated food is spewed out, there is a significant chance that the sufferer will become malnourished. In many cases, the sufferer attempts to eat less in order not to regurgitate food after eating.
Additional Eating Disorders
For information on other eating disorders such as PICA, Purging Disorder, ARFID (Avoidant/Restrictive Food Intake Disorder), Night Eating Syndrome and Orthorexia, please reach out.
