When considering that pathological eating disorders and their related diseases now afflict more people globally than malnutrition, some experts in the medical field are presently purporting that the world's number one health problem is no longer heart disease or cancer, but obesity. According to the World Health Organization (June, 2005), "obesity has reached epidemic proportions globally, with more than 1 billion adults overweight - at least 300 million of them clinically obese - and is a major contributor to the global burden of chronic disease and disability.When people start having bad thoughts and feelings about themselves their brain begins to develop certain new neuronal wiring (or connections) to produce certain behaviours. When people continue to acting on pathological behaviours like starving, binging-purging, over exercising etc: these neuronal pathways grow stronger and stronger. Basically it is what you think is what you get.
One may often ask, "Why did I get an eating disorder?" What many don't realize is that eating disorders are not random unfortunate occurrences but in fact have a purpose. In many instances, the eating disorder is symbolic of a difficulty in finding other more satiating ways to deal with important needs and emotional issues, some of which may not be accessible to awareness. As well, eating disordered clients typically will be resistant to giving up their eating disordered behaviour because they believe it makes them exceptional and unique, providing an identity when they are confused about their own.This is not to downplay for one minute the dangers and distress caused by full-blown eating disorders, including serious binge eating. However people can exercise a far greater control over what is personal and cultural than they can over what is becoming to be seen as endemic and medical," comments the 46 year old social entrepreneur from Manchester, England.
I know, from my 18 years of clinical case studies in my private practice, that by solving the mental attitudes you can stop a disease from becoming a physical one, or reverse one. For example an intervention early in teens can turn the tragic effects of eating disorders around .Today, as compared to the 1930's when Bach compassionately wanted to relieve those suffering in the Great Depression; we are beginning to understand disease at an energy level rather than a pathological one.Eating disorders indicate the strong combined activity of an underlying sense of lack of personal autonomy and an underlying sense of lack of self-control. The patient feels inordinately, paralysingly helpless and ineffective. His eating disorders are an effort to exert and reassert mastery over his own life. At this stage, he is unable to differentiate his own feelings and needs from those of others.
Simply resolving to no longer eat unhealthy foods is not the answer for most, nor does the answer lie in fad diets. If that were the case then everyone would be successful in their attempts at weight control and that certainly is not the case. There must instead be an unrelenting commitment to a change in lifestyle. One that is divorced from the destructive perspective that somehow there must be some form of atonement for failures to stay on track.
