6th July 2014 – Fabulous Magazine – The rise of food addicts
Sitting at her table, Emma devours a huge chicken tikka. Just an hour earlier, she’s devoured the kids’ leftover fish fingers and chips, and for supper she’ll work her way through a bag of crisps and an entire packet of biscuits on the sofa…
It may sound extreme, but Emma is part of a growing breed of women who suffer from ‘disordered eating’, a disturbed, unhealthy eating pattern that can include restrictive dieting, compulsive eating and skipping meals. “Disordered eating is on the rise” says Dr Bijal Chedda-Varma, a therapist at Nightingale Hospital London, which treats patients with eating disorders. “while we know a lot about anorexia and bulimia, we’re still learning about disordered eating, where women have a massive preoccupation with food. We’re now saturated by restaurants, cookery programmes and people constantly posting pictures of their meals on Instagram…”
Research reveals that one in for women admit to thinking about food every thirty minutes*, while five percent of us (that’s more than 1 million women), confess to having thoughts about food over 50 times a day**…
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