Binge eating is uncontrolled eating that occurs at least once a week. Afterwards people usually compensate for their binge by dieting, fasting, using laxatives or "exercising it off."
Researchers at Harvard University Medical School and McLean Psychiatric Hospital interviewed 9,000 people all over the United States about their eating habits and mental health. They found that 3.5% of women and 2% of men are binge eaters. Their disorder tends to last more than eight years. It puts them at a higher risk for obesity and diseases like stroke, heart attack, and diabetes.
All three eating disorders are more common among young people ages 18 to 29, and especially among people who were anxious and depressed.
About 1.5% of men and 0.5% of men suffer from bulimia or vomiting to control one's weight. Anorexia nervosa is an eating disorder that can cause people to diet until they are starving to death. The researchers found that it affects less than l% of American women and only 0.3% of men.
This study appears in the February issue of Biological Psychiatry.
Labels: bulimia, anorexia, binge eating
Posted By: Aspen Education Group
Good grief!! Listen to the researchers at the Harvard.
And God's sake exercise a degree of self-control!This is the only body you got!I am not a simpleton and I do believe that there are complex psycho-biological factors invoved. Having said that, let us not go psychologising or go to the MD's loking for a magic cure.I read it some place " The best way to lose weight is to walk the farthest distance with the heaviest weight for the longest time."
Then probably there would be no time for putting a label on your- self as a 'Binge eater'or some thing else that becomes fashionable with each revision of the DSM of the APA.