Tips for Preventing Disordered Eating Patterns – Maintain a Body Balance

The best way to prevent disordered eating pat­terns is to maintain a body that is in balance. However, so much misinformation circu­lates about what goes into making our bodies work at their best that it is hard to know what is really important.

In the simplest of terms, the body is an energy factory fueled and regulated by chemicals that it both takes in (as food) and produces (as hormones). To survive and thrive, the body depends upon keep­ing that intake and outgo in balance, and it strenu­ously resists any efforts to throw it off balance.

Dieting and bingeing throw this chemical fac­tory out of whack, so it's especially important to know how to rebalance and make the best use of what comes in—in the form of food. People in recovery from an eating disorder, especially those who have spent an excessive amount of time and energy obsessively controlling their food intake, need to refocus their attention on learning about and practicing healthy eating.

The goal is to take in enough food to balance outgo of energy with the maintenance of a body weight that is right for each individual.

Hunger and satiety

Under normal circumstances, people know to eat when they feel hungry and to stop eating when they feel full (or satiated). People who have eating disor­ders, however, lose the ability to feel these cues. This loss may be partially due to psychological causes, but disordered eating is known to throw the delicate chemical interaction of hunger and fullness off-balance.

Hunger and satiety happen in the brain—not in the stomach or gut. To put it simply, the feeling of being hungry or full depends on the level of nutri­ents and glucose in the blood that stimulate recep­tors in the stomach lining to secrete hormones that then signal the need for more or less food. Animal studies have shown that simply filling up the stom­ach with substances that do not produce nutrients or convert to glucose does not stop the animal from eating: Hunger is more than just having a full belly.

As the stomach releases a number of hormones, a complex chemical process alerts the brain to cre­ate the sensation of a full stomach. But if no new food is taken in to replenish blood sugar, the chem­ical adrenaline is released into the body, which ulti­mately causes the body to release stored sugar and to make sugar out of protein.

When this process occurs on a regular basis— during self-starvation, for example—it can overbur­den the body's emergency system and ultimately wear it out. In addition to these basic regulators, other hormones that are also important to the hunger/satiety balance may be rendered ineffective by bingeing and starvation.

This neuroendocrine system—that is, the system that provides the chemicals that create the circuits through which nerves send messages. Thus, the purpose of all this chemistry that relies on the intake of food is to keep all body processes running smoothly and to help us stay in balance. The whole process is called metabolism, which means the rate and efficiency at which the body turns food into energy.

The basal metabolic rate, which powers the body's invisible but critical functions, represents nearly three-fourths of all energy expenditure. This is why nutrition—the intake of food—is so impor­tant and why inadequate or irregular intake of food seriously interferes with body functions.