Author: frivvy89
A lot has happened since last time I posted but I can honestly say I am currently happy and healthy and making the most of my recovered life! Just before Christmas last year my boyfriend of two years and I broke up. It was so hard losing Nathan as he was my best friend and the person I honestly thought I would spend the rest of my life with however it became evident that we wanted different things in life and unfortunately he just wasn’t capable of loving me as much as I loved him. So I accepted the fact…
“You don’t finish eating I call policeman come catch you!” Sounds familiar? Yes, indeed it does, for this is something many of us grew up hearing. And our children aren’t spared from their grandparents’ threats of summoning either the police or the bogeyman, if they don’t finish their food. However, forcing children to finish their food does more harm than good. Here’s why. A study published in the Journal of Paediatric Psychology states that forcing children to finish their food disrupts normal eating behaviour and makes children vulnerable to unhealthy weight gain. A leading nutritionist, Maryann Jacobsen, further affirms this…
Along with our basic needs for nutrition, how we feel can play a role in what we choose to eat and how much we eat. A new study from the University of Texas at Dallas examines the reasons behind “emotional eating” with a focus on kids and how dietary habits develop in early childhood. Shayla Holub, the head of psychological sciences at UT Dallas, says eating can often be a response to negative emotions like sadness, anger or frustration, but not exclusively. Adults and children can eat out of boredom or when they’re feeling happy or excited as well.”In the long term, eating in response to anything besides your hunger and…
Recently, I stumbled upon an advertisement for a boot camp class for kids. They’re marketing it as designed to get kids moving (for health), but still. . . Kids don’t belong in a gym. While physical activity is important among our youth, no matter how many ways you spin it, kids need not be exercising or cooped up in a gym class to get their bodies moving. Kids should be outside playing tag and climbing monkey bars. They should be cannon balling into swimming pools and running through sprinklers in the hot, summer sun. They can be playing sports or dancing,…
You may already be familiar with the fact that eating disorders are life threatening mental illnesses. You may also know that, as well as snatching away important opportunities to develop positive relationships with food, body and other people, eating disorders also starve a person of the opportunity to live a fulfilled, happy, creative and autonomous life.If you have not suffered from an eating disorder yourself, but still have had experience of knowing a friend or loved one who has, you may or may not be familiar with the complexity of how it feels to be trapped within a mind that,…
This isn’t a psychology lecture, so don’t worry and pack up your pencil case and notebooks just yet … What some of you might remember, or be able to resonate with, is a popular psychology lesson about Maslow’s hierarchy of needs. Don’t worry if you don’t, as all will soon be revealed about exactly what these are. But, importantly, Maslow was a famous psychologist who, many many years ago, shared a popular idea that is still widely adopted today. This idea is that we humans are motivated, first and foremost, to satisfy our basic needs (i.e. for food, water and…
The TRUTH About Comfort Food Comfort food is actually about the need or the wish to be comforted by another person. If nobody is available to provide comfort, or if the people in your life are not able to respond in a way that feels good, that’s painful. The good news is that you can learn to give yourself what you need to feel better. If you’re turning to food for comfort, the primary challenge is learning to respond to yourself with language instead of action (eating). If you turn away from food as a way of feeling better, you’ve…
Binge eating disorder is the most prevalent eating disorder in the United States. Infographic courtesy of Multi-Service Eating Disorders Association With more than a third of the adult population of the United States meeting criteria for obesity, doctors are becoming increasingly interested in behaviors that contribute to these rates. Allan Kaplan is interested in improving treatment of binge eating disorder. Allan Kaplan, MD, of the University of Toronto, is interested in eating disorders, specifically binge eating disorder, which is observed in about 35 percent of people with obesity. Binge eating disorder (BED) is a pattern of disordered eating characterized…
“Americans lose about 112,000 years of healthy life each year because of foodborne illnesses,” says epidemiologist Elaine Scallan, of the University of Colorado School of Public Health.That’s what she and researchers at the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention concluded when they converted illness, disability, and premature deaths into lost years of healthy life.What health problems can food poisoning cause?Among all the microorganisms that can cause food poisoning, two stood out to Scallan and her colleagues: Salmonella and the parasite Toxoplasma gondii. Together, they’re responsible for more than half of those lost years, but for different reasons.With Salmonella, it’s the…
Do You Struggle with Food? Are you constantly thinking about food? Wondering what or when you’ll next eat, afraid you’ll go overboard for the day? Do you frequency try to ignore a nagging hunger? Do you find yourself reviewing your intake and planning ahead based on what you’ve already consumed? Do you think there’s a “right way” and a “wrong way” to eat? Have you tried most diets out there, only to give up, defeated after days or weeks or months? Has your weight yo-yo’ed with each new diet attempt? Are you caught up in a cycle of monitoring your…