Can Nutritional Counseling Help in the Treatment of Eating Disorders

nutritional counseling With the impact of social media and the images of airbrushed celebrities everywhere you go in San Antonio and other cities, it’s no wonder that eating disorders have become a serious problem. Eating disorders come with major health consequences, both physical and mental. Starvation can cause anxiety, insomnia, depression, and even a loss of libido. Eating disorders can slowly take over a person’s life and lead to thoughts of suicide and self-harm. What can nutritional counseling do to help with eating disorders? Quite a bit, it turns out. Here’s how.

Nutritional Counseling

Undergoing nutritional counseling means meeting with a clinical nutritionist or another nutrition specialist to determine your health needs and how changes in your diet might be able to help them. In the case of eating disorders, nutritional counseling is best when it occurs after doctors or other health professionals have diagnosed the issue and outlined a treatment plan going forward. 

Here are a few of the most common eating disorders and how a nutritional counselor can help on the road to recovery. 

Anorexia 

When someone has anorexia nervosa, or more commonly just anorexia, there are several things that they want to accomplish while working to overcome it. One is restoring body weight and then maintaining it indefinitely. When someone has anorexia, they can come to have very strong feelings about food, and treatment should focus on understanding those feelings and not reacting negatively to them. This also includes knowing when the body says it is hungry, and when it is full. Nutritional counseling will focus on gradually increasing food intake to not shock the body too much. This food should provide an increase in phosphate levels in the blood. A clinical nutritionist can help strategize for this. 

Bulimia

Bulimia is a disorder where the sufferer will fast, vomit, or purge after eating. People who suffer from bulimia will often binge eat and then compensate for that in cycles. This can cause issues with the stomach, as well as malnutrition. Counseling will focus again on having a healthier relationship with food. It will also aim to increase the blood sugar levels of the patient by ending the binge and purge cycle of eating. This means maintaining a healthy level of eating, which will also maintain potassium levels. 

Binge Eating

A binge eating disorder is one where the patient has little control over their impulses when it comes to food. They will eat even past the point of fullness. This not only can cause obesity, diabetes, and heart disease, but it comes with feelings of shame and guilt. Binge eating episodes can last for several hours, and often happen as often as once a week. When working on binge eating disorders, a clinical nutritionist will devise ways to help the patient regulate their blood-sugar levels by reducing binge eating and maintaining a more consistent eating routine. They must also help the patient work on being more neutral with food. That means understanding when the body is satiated and how to stop eating when that point comes. 

As you can see, nutritional counseling is about more than simply helping people to eat healthier. Eating disorders are serious medical issues, and after a doctor has diagnosed one, a patient needs help regaining their control over food and improve their relationship to it. By seeking counseling, they will have the support and knowledge they need to heal and get better. 

For more information about nutritional counseling in San Antonio and good tips about where to find the best nutritionist, visit https://www.chiropractic-sanantonio.com   

 

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