Whether they are underweight or overweight, both groups tend to go back and forth between severely restricting their food intake and overeating or bingeing. The treatment for binge eating is geared towards avoiding dieting, not focusing on weight, and on regularizing eating in order to break the restriction-binge cycle. At the same time, a common approach to obesity has been the diet--focus on calories, portion sizes, weight loss. This makes for mixed messages for the overweight person who also binge eats. Recent changes in the upcoming Diagnostic and Statistical Manual of Mental Disorders includes the diagnosis of Binge Eating Disorder and will hopefully allow for more common ground in the treatment of eating disorders and obesity, according to Ellin’s article.
So where is the common ground? For both underweight and overweight people with eating disorders, low self esteem and body dissatisfaction is common. Both place excessive emphasis on appearance and body size, says one expert quoted in the article. Both groups also suffer from weight stigma and bias. Shifting the focus away from weight and dieting is helpful treatment for both groups. “The focus should be on behaviors, not weight,” said Dianne Neumark-Sztainer in the article. She is a professor in the School of Public Health at the University of Minnesota. “We know from our research that talking about weight and diets is not effective, and for many leads to weight gain over time.”
On a societal level, it would help to reduce weight stigma and to lessen cultural pressure to be thin. On an individual level, it helps to resist checking the number on the scale and to focus on changing individual behaviors:eating regularly, learning to respond to feelings of hunger and fullness, and coming up with non-food-related strategies to cope with troubling emotions will help.
