Sweet Moods

Sweet Moods? Sugar and mood, a constant dietary struggle.  The body learns that reaching for a sweet treat brings energy, alertness and low anxiety.  Somehow it doesn’t learn that the crash will inevitably follow. There is now a small literature that supports the common sense observation that simple carbohydrates, like sugar and white flour, have effects that are somewhat akin …

Too Much Healthy Eating Can Be Bad for You

Medical practitioners have begun to recognize an eating disorder associated with a concern for healthy eating, “orthorexia nervosa”, in which a zealous concern for healthy food leads to clinical concerns for possible malnutrition, micronutrient and macronutrient deficiencies, inadvertent weight loss and social impairments. Avoidance or refusal of foods due to fear of impurities, processed foods, additives and imagined contaminants, while …

Habits for Weight Loss

Three Habits for Weight Loss

Many people with depression have trouble avoiding weight gain, a recent study suggests that there are three habits for weight loss which may help. The study, which was published in BMJ Open, tracked nearly 60,000 people in Japan who also had type 2 diabetes and looked at eating habits and their relationship to weight gain over time. Aside from the …

binge eating and bipolar

Binge Eating and Bipolar – Nancy

In our practice we often see a link between binge eating and bipolar.  Recent studies are showing that there is a link between emotional eating and bipolar disorder, with as many as 10% of bipolar sufferers also struggling with eating disorders, a much higher percentage than in the general population. The Mayo Clinic, which has studied the link between binge …

Can Junk Food Shrink Your Brain?

Did you know that increasing or even maintaining your intake of burgers, fries and soda pop—and pretty much any other hallmark of the “Western diet,” high in saturated fats and refined sugar—isn’t just an efficient way of rotting your teeth out and raising your risk of cancer, diabetes or heart disease, but that you may also be shrinking your brain? …

Mental Health Parity Victory in California

On September 10th the California Supreme Court let stand a California Appeals Court decision that the California mental health parity law requires coverage of treatment that may have no equivalent in other medical specialties. Specifically, the Appeals Court held that Blue Shield of California must cover residential treatment for eating disorders. The Court noted that residential treatment was among the …

Food, Mood and Cognition

We recently got a useful update on this topic from one of the clinicians who works with us at Gateway Psychiatric. She had attended a seminary of the same title from the Institute for Natural Resources. Inflammation can be associated with poor diet for example, high consumption of sugars, especially high fructose corn syrup and high saturated fat intake. Chronic …

Hormones and Food

In an earlier post we talked about some of the research on appetite. We reviewed some of the peptide hormones that regulate appetite and how the entire system that controls appetite is really designed to cope better with a time of scarcity than a time of plenty. Here I want to talk more specifically about the interplay between other hormone …

Hunger Regulation

Recently several folks have asked us questions about diet, hunger, weight gain, and nutrition. Certainly for many people with depression, gaining weight is an important issue, both as a cause and consequence of depression. Let’s begin by trying to make some sense of hunger. In other posts we will be talking about how stress and the hormone system relates to …

Drunkorexia

There is a new kind of eating disorder that has been recently plaguing many college students. This disorder is referred to as Drunkorexia. Drunkorexia is a mix of starving yourself and binge drinking. People engage in Drunkorexia in order to make up for the calories from alcohol by not eating regular food. The demographic that most commonly falls victim to Drunkorexia are college females.  These …

Losing Control: A Tale about Binge-Eating Disorder

Individuals facing stress, anxiety, or depression will sometimes fall prey to eating disorders. While anorexia and bulimia have received a lot of attention, one of the most prevalent eating disorders is binge-eating disorder. Binge-eating disorder can be detrimental to both a healthy mental and physical state. A man who suffered from binge-eating disorder shared his story with the New York …