If you’re stocking up on back-to-school supplies, a crucial item is eating disorders’ awareness. You may be trying to zip up that extra-ten pounds of camp/vacation-noshing flesh. Or you just might want to look great as you reconnect with friends and vow to have a good year.
But if you’re trying to take off weight by unhealthy means such as fasting, purging or using diet products (a.k.a. disordered eating behaviors), you may be on the school bus to trouble.
A recent study published in the International Journal of Eating Disorders showed that students who are engaging in disordered eating behaviors are also more likely to be smoking, drinking and experimenting with drugs.
Ruth Streigel-Moore’s group at Wesleyan University in Middletown, CT surveyed 13,917 U.S. high school students. The researchers found that 1 in 5 females and 1 in 10 males exhibited at least one eating disordered behavior. Fasting was the most common, followed by diet product use and purging. At the same time, more than 20 percent of students binge drank or smoked cigarettes. How’s that for summer’s bounty of partying opportunities.
Overall, those who engaged in disordered eating were also more likely to be using any one of 10 substances studied, from alcohol and methampetamine to steroids and inhalants (Inhalants were the most prevalent substance that students reportedly used, tempting 10 percent of students.)
The authors suggest that a number of reasons could explain the eating-disorder/substance use connection.
--The students who most want to alter their weight and shape are using all means possible i.e. inhalants cause nausea, and smoking alters metabolism.
--Students may be looking for escapes from emotional troubles by any and all means.
--The impulsive type doing one risky behavior is likely to jump easily to another.
Whatever the reason, the findings raise concerns. In the boys, eating disordered behaviors were linked to the use of every substance studied, particularly steroids. And males tend to engage in substance use more than females. On the other hand, girls are twice as likely to engage in disordered eating. And they prefer inhalants as their number one substance of potential abuse apart from smoking and drinking. (Right now, inhalants are poorly studied by researchers.)
Overall, there is a message to clinicians working with adolescent populations: you “need to be mindful that weight control efforts may signal substance use and vice versa,” the authors write.
For those students in the trenches: experimentation is better left to the biology lab.
If you see the following behaviors in friends, they are red flags disordered eating and a potential eating disorder:
1. Skipping meals or gorging on food
2. Obsessing about body and clothing size
3. Exercising excessively and compulsively
4. Acting moody, irritable and having difficult talking about feelings
5. Having problems with forming and maintaining friendships
6. Smoking or taking drugs to change body shape and/or size
Web Resources:
More Signs of an Eating Disorder
Visit site
Ten Things Parents Can Do to Prevent Eating Disorders in their Children
Visit site