Another way Ozempic and the new class of drugs affects eating disorders is by normalizing food restriction and hunger. The medications enable people to eat very little, tolerate long stretches of hunger and lose weight.
Recovery from an eating disorder requires regular meals and snacks through the day. This type of eating plan not only gives the body the regular nourishment necessary to be well but also teaches the body how to regulate the cycle of hunger, digestion, absorption, metabolic function and hunger again. It’s necessary for anyone to get used to this pattern to get well.
These new medications ignore this cycle and instead promote hunger and food restriction as erroneously necessary for health. This message is dangerous for people with eating disorders.
If someone on recovery tries Ozempic, the weight loss and sustained low appetite will trigger old eating disorder thought patterns, most notably the fear of eating and of weight gain. Associating regular meals with weight gain rather than a normal part of life can lead to relapse quickly.
Even for people who don’t have eating disorders but instead have disordered eating thoughts, Ozempic can trigger a full blown eating disorder. The idea that a medication can provide the holy grail of low appetite and weight loss can convince people susceptible to become afraid of eating at all and certainly of ever getting off the medication.
The difficult next steps are how to address the presence of Ozempic and its cousins in the treatment of eating disorders. For now learning about how these new medications work will be most important. It’s better to understand the long term nature of these medications and consider the current and future risks of worsening the eating disorder epidemic than to turn a blind eye.
No comments:
Post a Comment