eating together

Most of us have a normal and healthy relationship with food. We eat to keep our bodies functioning properly, we eat for the sheer taste and enjoyment of it, and we eat together with friends and family as a way to bond and stay in touch with our social partners. It can be very hard for those of us who have normal healthy eating habits to understand the hell that those with eating disorders have to endure on a daily basis.

An eating disorder is an extremely harmful condition in which a person adopts harmful practices involving food as a way to deal with emotional pain. Once the eating disorder has truly taken control of their lives, the sufferer often has no control of their own to break free. They can be stuck in a downward spiral of negative activity that leads to ridicule, concern of family and friends, and a host of negative medical ailments that only gets worse with time. Unfortunately, many people don’t understand these disorders and instead of trying to empathize with their situation, they merely look down on them for having lack of discipline in their eating habits. If it were only as easy as snapping out of it, many who suffer eating disorders certainly would because going through the pain and torture of having an eating disorder can not only be one of the most serious things that ever affects one’s life, it can also lead to one’s death.

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Let’s look at a scenario of someone who is suffering from bulimia. Bulimia is a condition in which a person will first binge eat all kinds of food often totaling thousands of calories, and then once they realize what they have done, they choose to force themselves to vomit to avoid gaining weight from all those calories. In addition, they may resort to such tactics as using laxatives to lose weight or even exercising for hours at a time to burn off any excess fat they did gain. These individuals feel a strong compulsion to this binge and purge relationship with food and often simply can’t break free. Believe me it can be incredibly difficult to suffer with because many bulimics maintain a fairly normal weight and others may not know about their condition. This leaves the sufferer to keep their condition in the dark and they may suffer alone for years before the secret ever comes out.

It is important for us as individuals and members of society to try to understand that people suffering from eating disorders have a sickness which they have little control over. Because of the stigmas associated with them, many folks won’t ever seek treatment for fear that their secret will become public and they would have to deal with the shame thrown on them by their peers. If we could begin to use compassion versus criticism, many more people may seek to speak about the troubles that they are suffering from and seek help from others to rid themselves of horrible conditions such as eating disorders.

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