Mental Health

Can You Still Be Healthy if You’re Overweight?

We are frequently reminded that Americans are getting fatter and fatter. How many times have you seen television footage of headless people walking down the street with the camera focused on the abdomens, thighs and buttocks of very overweight people? A former surgeon general of the United States believed obesity was a greater threat than [...]

Inventory of Stress Symptoms

What is stress? Stress is the mental and/or physical tension or strain the body experiences in response to events happening in a person's life. Stress affects our internal organs, like the heart and stomach, and impedes our mental state, emotional reactions, relationships and spirituality. Medical problems, such as heart disease, are stressful in many ways: [...]

Binge Eating Disorder

  Binge Eating Disorder (BED) was recognized as a diagnosable eating disorder in the 5th edition of the Diagnostic and Statistical Manual, the guide to all psychiatric diagnoses, published in May 2013.  Prior to this, BED was frequently referred to as ‘compulsive overeating’ or ‘emotional overeating’ and was not recognized as the clinically significant and [...]

Rescuing the Brain: A Critical Part of Recovery

Recovering from an eating disorder is a complicated endeavor because of the interplay between genetic predisposition, symptom severity, environmental/lifestyle factors and often, the patient’s ambivalence about changing behaviors they both ‘want’ and hate. I have attended several presentations by Ovidio Bermudez, MD, the Medical Director of Child and Adolescent Services at Eating Recovery Center in [...]

I Hate Exercise

“I hate exercise.“ This was the first thing a 78 year old woman said to me at our initial appointment when I was reviewing the reasons her cardiologist referred her to me. The doctor wanted her to increase her activity level and lose weight. The woman had some, but not much, interest in losing weight [...]

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