Coping with addiction 

Eating Disorder

An eating disorder is a mental illness that causes serious disturbances to your everyday diet, such as eating extremely small amounts of food or severely overeating. A person with an eating disorder may have started out just eating smaller or larger amounts of food, but at some point, the urge to eat less or more spirals out of control. Severe distress or concern about body weight or shape may also signal an eating disorder. Common eating disorders include anorexia nervosa, bulimia nervosa, and binge-eating disorder (NIMH.com).

You may have Anorexia Nervosa if:

• Your are under minimum weight for your gender, age, height
• You see yourself as overweight, even when you are underweight
• Your behavior around food and weight control becomes an obsession
• Your self esteem is based totally on your body image
• You binge eat or extreme diet, followed by excessive exercise, self-induced vomiting, and misuse of laxatives

You may have Bulimia Nervosa if:

• You have recurrent and frequent episodes of eating unusually huge amounts of food in a short period of time and feel a lack of control over these episodes
•  You experience self-induced vomiting, excessive use of laxatives or diuretics, fasting, excessive exercise, while still maintaining a healthy or normal weight
•  You have constant fear of gaining weight, and you are intensely unhappy with your body size

You may have Binge Eating if:

• you are overweight or obese
• You feel that you are loosing control with food
• You eat a huge amount of food in a short period of time not followed by purging, excessive exercise, or fasting

Treatment is often tailored to individual needs and may include: psychotherapy to help you learn to identify unhelpful thoughts and emotions related to eating disorder and change your behavior accordingly, nutrition counseling to help you reach healthy weight, and mood stabilizers medications.

 

Substance: Alcohol and Drug Use

If alcohol or drugs causes you clinically and functionally significant impairment, such as health problems, if you fail to meet major responsibilities at work, school, home, and social impairment you need professional help!

There are different drugs, such as: Cannabis, Stimulate, Hallucinogen, Opioid with various side effects.

Alcohol can be found in beer, wine, and liquor, and is a central nervous system depressant. You may drink to socialize, celebrate, and relax as drinking alcohol is itself not necessarily a problem but drinking too much can cause a range of consequences (NIAAA.nih.gov).

What is drinking too much? Having blood alcohol concentration levels to 0.08 g/dL (usually 4 drinks for women and 5 alcoholic drinks for men) within about 2 hours or on the same occasion on one day.

Drinking too much can affect your body and your health.  It can effect your thought process, damage your heart, takes a toll on your liver, pancreas, increase the risk for developing certain cancers, and weaken your immune system.

Treatment: The good news is that in general, Cognitive Behavioral Therapy (CBT) and REBT, treatment modality, can help you. The earlier that treatment can begin, the more effective it is. Motivational enhancement therapy helps people with substance use to build motivation, engage in treatment and seek recovery (www.samhsa.gov)

Depending on the problems and severity, you might need to take medications prescribed usually by a psychiatrist (MD) or your primary physician.

In addition, support groups, such as Alcoholics Anonymous and Narcotics Anonymous are found to be very helpful after intense therapy sessions ends.

 

To read more about CBT and REBT and how it can help you please click