If your family is like so many others and has a large Thanksgiving, then you’ve almost certainly spent the last several days overindulging and eating until your stomach feels like it’s going to burst. That said, contrary to a popular and misinformed belief, eating too much at Thanksgiving, or any of the surrounding holidays, does not mean you have an eating disorder.
Treatment is not necessary as you are not an overeater or a binge eater if eating to excess this one time of year or even on occasion is your main crime.
Eating disorders are classified by the National Institute of Mental Health as “illnesses that cause serious disturbances to your everyday diet, such as eating extremely small amounts of food or severely overeating.” A lot of the time these illnesses can start as disruptive or unhealthy eating habits that spiral out of control.
Common signs of an eating disorder are often an obsessive attitude towards food as well as one’s weight and body image. Eating disorder treatment is regularly recommended for those suffering from the three most common eating disorders, anorexia nervosa, bulimia nervosa and binge-eating disorder.
Eating Disorders and Co-Occurring Illnesses
Eating disorders fall into a category of mental illnesses that often are accompanied by other diseases. We call them co-occurring because an individual can suffer from both illnesses simultaneously, and these co-occurring illnesses can influence each other and often intensify the other’s symptoms.
Other illnesses that often co-occur with an eating disorder are depression, substance abuse and several different types of anxiety disorders. Eating disorder treatment as well as treatment for the co-occurring illness must happen at the same time in order to increase its effectiveness and the likelihood of recovering from both diseases.
Eating Disorder Treatment
Eating disorders are commonly treated with a multi-tiered approach. For starters, it’s important to remember that an eating disorder by definition is a mental illness; therefore, simply sending the sufferer to receive nutritional counseling will not be an effective treatment plan, as it will not deal with the mental and emotional aspect of the disease, which a facility like Destination Hope is designed to handle.
Cognitive-behavioral therapy serves as a large component of eating disorder treatment to try and identify the underlying issues that are causing and encouraging the disorder to exist. Quality eating disorder treatment will include individual, group and family counseling – working in conjunction with medical care and nutritional counseling.
Destination Hope is a full-service drug and alcohol rehab facility that specializes in the treatment of eating disorders. Eating disorders regularly accompany addiction and a very individualized treatment plan is needed for those who suffer from them. If there is someone in your life who may be suffering from an eating disorder and is also abusing drugs or alcohol, do not hesitate to put her in contact with the experts at Destination Hope today. You just might save her life.
