Craving for a particular body stature can put one at risk of developing eating disorders, Registered Dietician, Naa Nyarkoa Gyan Mantey, has said.
According to her, people’s desire to fit into, and attain certain body shapes causes them to take in medications and substances that may be detrimental to their health if care is not taken.
“One of the very common causes of eating disorders is the environmental influence…sometimes with media advertisements, there is a particular type of people tagged with a perfect body type and this impacts various individuals but that might not be the truth.
“Athletes, those into modelling or gymnastics who will always want to maintain a particular body shape can result in eating disorders. You find some people exercising excessively, restricting their diet, and some will even try to vomit or use laxatives just to lose weight. This may result in severe consequences if you do not also maintain a good diet,” she explained.
She added that persons who usually engage in drug abuse are more likely to avoid eating at the appropriate time due to the effect of the drugs.
“When [an] individual consumes some of these drugs, they are probably high and when you are high, you do not feel a lot of things. So the time that the individual would have eaten will be skipped because the person is high,” she told UniversNews in an exclusive interview.
Eating disorders
The Dietician registered her displeasure at how late people report cases of eating disorders.
She noted: “Some of these [disorders] are not commonly seen in these hospitals because people don’t think of them as medical or health concerns…unless it is becoming detrimental to the health that everybody can see.
“The one that would oftentimes bring an individual to the hospital is anorexia because some of them see themselves as overweight but in reality they are underweight.”
She urged all and sundry to focus on maintaining healthy body weights while eating healthily.
“We should rather encourage that everybody will love who they are and ensure that they are maintaining good body weight. It helps to boost people’s self-esteem because some people go into these eating disorders because family or partners want them to have a particular form or shape.
“Sometimes, people who are also depressed eat for comfort and it makes them gain a lot of weight which can result in the binge eating disorder,” she added.