14 DAY TRIAL // Going to college is a happy but also stressful moment in life, for many young people, and it can lead some into dangerous battles with eating disorders.
Mary Boggiano, PhD, Associate Professor of Psychology at the University of Alabama at Birmingham, shares some experience from her college years, when she fought against bulimia.
Moving away from home for the first time, into a totally different environment and meeting new people can be very stressful for college students and stress can trigger eating disorders, like anorexia, bulimia or binge eating.
Boggiano says that even new positive events can be perceived by the brain as being stressful.
“A lot of students have heard about the 'freshman 15,'” she says.
“To keep from gaining weight, some students engage in risky behaviors such as excessive dieting or purging food and in many cases, people learn about the risky behaviors from others students in their dorm or over the Internet, so that obsession about weight can become infectious.”
Eating disorders manifest in specific ways and individuals start to have a problem when they start calculating calories, fat grams and carbohydrate grams, when they feel the need of weighing themselves more than once a day and they are affected by the numbers on the scale.
People with eating disorders exercise, skip meals or purge after overeating, exercise to burn calories instead of doing it for fun or for their health, or they find it very difficult to stop eating once they begin.
Eating secretly, feeling guilty, ashamed or disgusted after overeating, valuing oneself according to looks or weight, constantly worrying about weight and body shape or abusing diet pills or laxatives are the common signs of eating disorders, that can lead to long-term health problems and sometimes death.
Boggiano advices any young people who are susceptible of developing eating disorders to seek help at campus counseling centers, a family doctor or pastor or programs like Overeaters Anonymous, as trying to solve the problem alone is only worsening the situation.
She says: “Whatever you do, don't try to take care of it by yourself, it will only get worse,” Science Daily reports.
The two most common forms of eating disorders are anorexia nervosa and bulimia nervosa, to which adds binge eating disorder, or BED.
Anorexia nervosa is an illness that people that stop eating or eat very little to control their weight develop, and bulimia nervosa affects people that vomit or use laxatives to get rid of the food they have eaten to prevent weight gain.
Binge eating disorder is when someone eats unusually large amounts of food, uncontrollably, in a short period of time until they are uncomfortable but do not purge or compensate afterward.