An eating disorder is a serious mental illness, characterised by eating, exercise and body weight or shape becoming an unhealthy preoccupation of someone’s life.
An eating disorder is a serious condition characterized by consistently poor eating habits that may damage your body and hurt your physical, mental, and emotional health. Typically, someone with an eating disorder has an unhealthy focus on weight, body shape, and food.
Eating disorder-related behaviors may include overeating and purging, eating past when you are full, or not eating at all. The most common types of eating disorders include anorexia nervosa, bulimia nervosa, and binge-eating disorder (BED).
A high number of people who seek weight-loss programs suffer from an eating disorder. A comprehensive evaluation before undergoing weight loss efforts must include a screening for an eating disorder of any kind.
Furthermore, many restrictive habits required after bariatric surgery may predispose some men and women to develop or relapse into an eating disorder. Your postsurgical primary care provider must be knowledgeable about these risks.
Binge-eating disorder is the most common of all eating disorders. Many obese people have this disorder. However, some people with BED are not overweight at all.
BED is characterized by eating large amounts of food in a short time and being unable to stop despite being full. With BED, you feel that you do not have control over the amount of food you consume and then feel shame and guilt over your behavior.
A BED diagnosis requires three or more being-eating behaviors that may include:
BED differs from bulimia nervosa in that you do not feel the urge to purge or vomit after overeating. If you have BED before or after bariatric surgery, you must seek treatment from a trusted provider like Dr. Saradih.
It is essential to understand that bariatric surgery doesn’t treat or cure an eating disorder. If you have an eating disorder before weight-loss surgery, you are at a higher risk for struggling after surgery as well.
Post-surgery weight loss may involve restrictive eating that could increase your chances of adopting BED behaviors. You’ll have some changes to your eating patterns after surgery that may increase your risk for BED, and they include:
Because eating a large amount of food in one sitting may be impossible, it is easy to miss signs of BED after bariatric surgery. It takes a knowledgeable provider like Dr. Saradih to catch early symptoms of an eating disorder after weight-loss surgery.
If you have an eating disorder, either before or after bariatric surgery, call the office or use online booking to schedule an appointment with Dr. Saradih at Internal & Bariatric Medicine.
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