Causes and Influences of Eating Disorders

An eating disorder, as the word implies, is a condition where there is trouble present in the way a person consumes food. There’s Bulimia, in which a person overeats before forcefully making themselves throw up, and Anorexia, in which a person barely eats and overexercises, and may even throw up the minimal food that they try to consume.

Bulimia: Extreme Stress and Pressure

Many of us feel happy when we eat delicious foods. Studies show that people gain high amounts of happiness from satisfying meals. Furthermore, it is said that the meals we eat have a direct impact on our mental state.

Bulimia is oftentimes triggered by holding onto mental stress. High-demand environments in school or work can cause high amounts of stress that leads to people overeating excessively. A person finds stress relief through eating, then feels guilty afterward and feels more stressed which urges them to eat more again. This is the perpetual negative cycle a bulimic can fall into.

Anorexia: Self-Hate and Extreme Desire for Weight Loss

People who have negative body images are more prone to anorexia. A belief that others would view them positively if they were thinner or an experience where they were made fun of for being fat will push them toward self-hate. This is thought to be the stem root of why people become anorexic.

However, sometimes anorexia is much more complicated than that and is hard to treat. We recommend anyone with possible anorexia to go seek professional help.

Anorexia causes both mental and physical pain. In terms of physical, the lack of nutrients causes insomnia, low body temperature, dizziness, dry skin, loss of hair, and menstrual cycle irregularities. In terms of mental, a person can become short-tempered due to hormone imbalances, experience poor concentration, and memory. Anorexics also constantly tire themselves out from the fear of gaining any weight. There is no benefit to anorexia and it should be treated immediately.

Easy Preventative Measures We Can Start From Today

Eating disorders are hard to overcome once it happens, so the best way to prevent it is by incorporating preventative measures within your daily activities. Bulimia and anorexia both have mental strain as a common trigger, so it’s important that we strive for minimal stress every day to prevent it.

1. Make Exercise Your Hobby

Exercise is an excellent way to prevent eating disorders. It’s a healthy way to control weight and health for anorexics and a great stress reliever for bulimics.

As for the ideal exercise, cardio like walking, running, and swimming are great as you can keep at it at your own pace. If it’s possible to habituate, team exercises like soccer and baseball are wonderful choices as well.

Find an exercise that you can enjoy with moderate strain. The best is if you could find an exercise that becomes your hobby as well.

2. Enjoy Meals with Your Family

There are 2 reasons why family meals can help prevent eating disorders.

First, a person can compare the amount they eat with others around them. People with eating disorders don’t eat enough or overeat. One of the reasons for this is that they have a hard time understanding standard portion sizes. By eating meals with family, they can observe how much other people eat and understand portions. This could prevent them from steering off into unhealthy beliefs and irregular portions.

Secondly, it changes the way they enjoy food. The focus on food causes extreme portions, ultimately leading to eating disorders. There’s no problem in enjoying the food, but if the focus can shift to the enjoyment of the time spent with others, it can take away their focus on food.

３. Talk About Your Struggles to Others

Eating disorders are believed to be triggered by some sort of mental strain they experience. Therefore, it’s important that we are letting go of our stress constantly through talking to others. Whether it’s family, friends, co-workers, or a therapist, sharing our struggles with someone can be very helpful. Just verbalizing the experience can alleviate a lot of the stress, so we recommend that you talk to someone before the stress snowballs into something bigger.

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Face Yourself to Overcome Eating Disorders

Eating disorders don’t really have an easy fix to them. It’s difficult to completely cure it once it occurs, so preventative measures are essential. We hope that everyone who reads this chooses to live an authentic and healthy life where they don’t feel the need to judge themselves through the numbers on a scale.

References：

Maekawa, H. (2009). Female Eating Disorders and Attachment to Weight & Body Shape -Individual Differences from Multiple Perspectives. Keio University. https://core.ac.uk/download/pdf/145731819.pdf

Okamoto, M., & Muto, K. (2011). The factor to give the feeling of satisfaction of the meal of the college women. Nagasaki International University Review, 11, 105–117. https://ci.nii.ac.jp/naid/120005578664

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An Imaginary Bus will Take Away your Stress

The “mindbus” is a common technique used in mindfulness-based cognitive behavioral therapies. It helps alleviate the stress that comes from the situation of having to suppress one’s own needs. If you’re interested in finding out more about mindfulness, check out the article below.

The mindbus technique is very simple to practice, and it is a method of stress-care that can be completed with no special environment or tools, just your own imagination. For example, if you’re on a diet and think, “I want to eat something sweet!” or if you’re in the middle of work and think, “I want to play games!” These are the moments when you should try this technique.

The steps are as follows.

1. Visualize the craving in your mind as clearly as possible. (If you’re trying to suppress your sweet tooth, visualize yourself eating those sweets.)

2. Put the concrete image of that craving on an imaginary bus.

3. After you let the imaginary bus run for a while, let the object of desire off at any bus stop.

That’s all it takes to relieve the stress of having to withhold any desire.
It may sound somewhat silly on paper, and it may seem hard to believe. However, a study from Swansea University in the United Kingdom found that the group using this technique had more self-control and less stress. The mindbus technique is a scientifically proven method of stress management.

Effective in Improving Efficiency of Work or Diets

Regardless of age or lifestyle, we are often in a position where we must withhold the desire to do something. Whether it be smoking, drinking, playing smartphone games, or cheating on your diet, there are many temptations that surround us in our daily lives. This creates the desires in us, which sometimes lead to serious addictions.

When your mind is controlled by your own cravings, you may find it difficult to get things done, and your work and daily life may be less efficient. “I want to lose weight but all I can think about is junk food…” or “I can’t concentrate on work because I can’t get my videogame out of my head…” These are times when you can use the “mindbus” to reduce your own cravings. Challenge yourself to be in control. Increased self-control may help you focus better, which may help you work more efficiently and accomplish tasks.

Since the mindbus is a technique for suppressing one’s own thoughts, it is also thought to be effective in suppressing negative thoughts, such as trauma, that one cannot forget even if one wants to. We have a mechanism in our thoughts called the paradoxical effect of thought suppression: the more we try not to think about it, the more we think about it. It is difficult for anyone to suppress negative thoughts and desires by their own will. By using the mindbus and taking steps to move away from negative thoughts, you may be able to naturally avoid thinking about things you don’t want to think about.

Throw Away Your Negative Thoughts and Turn to the Positive

The “mindbus technique” is meant to keep your own cravings and negative thoughts away from you. Try it out when you feel stressed out from having to put up with something in your daily life. The key to taking care of stress quickly is to have some form of stress relief on hand. Having a coping mechanism on standby, such as the mindbus technique, helps to keep your mental health in check. There are also many other stress-care techniques besides the mindbus technique that you can use easily. Knowing what works for you and getting into the habit of practicing them when you feel stressed is the key to living a healthy and comfortable life.

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Image：Unsplash
Reference：
Jenkins, K. T., & Tapper, K. (2014). Resisting chocolate temptation using a brief mindfulness strategy. British Journal of Health Psychology, 19(3), pp. 509-522

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The Adaptation of AI in the Food Industry

The food industry is a pretty broad expression that describes our everyday food on the table and local supermarkets, to restaurants, food factories, farmers, and general agriculture. All of these places are possibilities for AI to intervene for enhancement.

For example, AI interfaces that already exist for everyday assistance would be apps that provide healthy meal recipes catered to our needs or camera apps that can automatically calculate the calories on a plate. At industrial levels, factories and retail stores use AI to enhance productivity through inventory management and cashless payment systems.

In agriculture, there are farms that already use automated tractors to plow the land and drones programmed to automatically spray pesticides in specific areas when the cameras sense harmful pests.

Although the applications of AI are diverse, there are still challenges. If the AI malfunctions for whatever reason, in the end, it requires manual intervention from a human. There are still lots of improvements and testing that need to be done to rely upon completely automated systems.

The Possibilities of Robot Chefs

Are you aware of the “Moley Robotics Kitchen?’

It’s an automated kitchen robot that can cut, stir, boil, serve, and clean up afterward. This invention was made by a company called Moley Robotics that released its prototype in 2015 to provide an automated cooking service.

People were amazed when they first saw the two robotic arms artfully complete human tasks.

It downloads recipes from its own site and the user could pick different menus from various countries, cooking time, and calories. It’s a great idea in concept but has not been implemented yet due to challenges such as costs. Moley Robotics claims commercial use plans to happen in 2021.

It’s crazy that a robot can provide cooking services from scratch from whatever menu we like. AI robots can store and learn from their data, constantly improving their technique. In that sense, AI has a lot of potential in making our lives greater.

The Era of Robot Restaurants on the Rise

There are restaurants in the world that already implement automation by robots. In China, there is a robot-aided hotpot restaurant where robots roam the floor to serve while, an AI system assists to manage the kitchen, reception, and inventory for optimal productivity.

There are still real humans involved as they need to assure aspects of safety and maintenance. However, automation allows for the company to cut big costs. With the extra money, they can invest more into food materials, menu development, and service quality, which adds more value to the restaurant and increases customer satisfaction.

Another high interest among food AI developers is to “quantify taste.” This will allow an. objective perspective through data, and the collected data will help understand developers whether certain factors like age and sexual orientation matter in what we consider delicious. If taste could be understood through data, in turn, it will help us understand our own liking of food.

High Hopes for AI Future Tech in Food

AI already is part of our lives and has so much more potential to enhance our eating experience. Although it will still take time to completely rely on automation, over time, the technological developments will most likely allow us to rely on AI for nutrition and eating habit management. Accurate information obtained from AI deep learning will solidify the grounds enough for people to rely upon it.

An AI that can provide the best-customized menu according to a person’s health conditions, taste buds, and timing without any manual labor involved, will surely have a demand for busy health-conscious people.

We all desire safe delicious meals. It may not be that far into the future that we can rely on technology that assists this.

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Reference：

Izawa, H., & Yamanishi, R. (2018, June 5–8). How can we apply AI to a study of gastronomy? [Presentation]. The 32nd Annual Conference of the Japanese Society for Artificial Intelligence, Kagoshima, Japan. https://www.jstage.jst.go.jp/article/pjsai/JSAI2018/0/JSAI2018_2O3OS24b02/_pdf/-char/ja

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Is Blue-Backed Fish Helpful for Depression?

Blue-backed fish is a distinguished category of fish used in Japanese cuisine, usually white meat fish, that tends to be fatty and have a lighter flavor.

A team at the National Cancer Center Japan published research on how people who consumed blue-backed fish were at less risk for depression. This is because the omega-3 fatty acids in blue-backed fish (such as mackerels and sardines) are known to reduce the risk of depression.

Omega-3 fatty acids have the following characteristics:

• An Anti-inflammatory
• A Neuroprotective
• Regulates the immune system
• Regulates neurotransmitters

Much research is ongoing on whether this is effective for depression and if there’s any relevance between omega-3 fatty acids and depression.

The human body cannot naturally produce omega-3 fatty acids, so the only way to gain their benefits is by consuming them. It’s an essential nutrient for us to live a healthy life. Omega-3 fatty acids also oxidize very fast so it is recommended to consume them with foods rich in beta-carotene such as green peppers, carrots, and pumpkins.

Be Careful of How Much Oil You Use!

Research conducted by a Japanese team took 1181 mid-aged people to observe the effects of omega-3 fatty acids. Results showed that it did reduce the risk of depression, but on the other hand, after a certain amount consumed, there was no further effect. This is because the effects of omega 3 fatty acids can be neutralized by omega 6 fatty acids.

Omega 6 fatty acids, similar to omega 3, are nutrients that the body cannot self-produce. Soybean oil and sesame oil are known to contain omega 6 fatty acids. People who end up consuming high amounts of omega 6 fatty acids are usually getting it from eating a lot of stir fry foods.

Omega 3 and 6 work in a way that cancels out each other if one is consumed at a higher rate. Both contain an important nutrient value, but an unbalanced intake is tied to the risk of various lifestyle diseases. As a measure, Omega 3 and 6 should be taken at a rate of 4-5:1.

People With Depressive Tendencies Choose Fast Foods

On the other hand, an unhealthy diet makes us prone to the risk of depression.

A study that followed 12,000 people for 6 years concluded that high consumption of the following foods resulted in a higher risk for depression in people:

• Processed Meats
• Sausages
• Drinks with high sugar content and desserts
• Junk food

These foods contain trans fatty acids also known as trans fat. The high intake of it is thought to contribute to depression.

According to the World Health Organization (WHO), trans fat should only consist of 1% of your daily total food intake as a measure. Be mindful of ingredients that are considered unhealthy when consumed excessively.

Diets Change Our Mental and Physical Wellbeing

The charts below round up the categories of foods according to the nutritions mentioned above. (Figure 1 & 2)

There are other foods also known to help our mental wellbeing.
We’ve touched upon this topic before in our past post, but berries are great for our health!

Our everyday diet plays an important role in determining our health. A long continually sustained healthy diet is essential in keeping our health optimal.

Reflect on your eating habits and tendencies. A small shift and understanding in your diet can create a big change for a better future.

Looking to improve your mental wellbeing? Try the SELF MIND app FREE for 1 week!
If you’re looking for more tips on how to care for your mental health, check out some of our past blog posts!

Reference：

Okada, H., Hagiya, K., Ishihara, S., Taniguchi, K., & Nakajima, S. (2008). Research on What People Like to Eat and It’s Relation to Mental Health. The Proceedings of the Annual Convention of the Japanese Psychological Association, 72(0), 2AM036. https://doi.org/10.4992/pacjpa.72.0_2am036

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Nutrition for the Soul

The food we eat provides us with the nutrients we need for our daily activities. But did you know that our heart needs these nutritions as much as our bodies? There are a number of nutrients that are very helpful for the prevention and treatment of mental disorders. Various studies have proven that diet has a strong impact on physical health as well as our mental health.

The Hidden Benefits of a Traditional Diet

In Japan, a traditional meal is typically governed by the “one soup and three side dishes” rule. This means that the meal would consist of one staple food (usually rice), one soup dish (usually miso-soup), and three other small portioned side dishes that may include grilled fish, pickled vegetables, tofu, eggs, or fermented beans (known in Japanese as natto). People who are not familiar with the culture may think that this is an awful lot of separate small dishes for one meal, but the “one soup and three side dishes” rule allows the Japanese to maintain a delicious and well-balanced diet.

Another traditionally healthy food option is the Mediterranian diet from Italy, Spain, and Greece. It is characterized by recipes that are rich in beans and tomatoes. Experiments were done to see how additional mixed nuts and olive oil in these Mediterranean diets influence the body and mind. Researchers conducted this experiment across various regions of Europe. Type II diabetics that added mixed nuts to the traditional diet had a 41% lower risk of developing depression. Individuals who have depression tend to experience mild inflammation and a disturbance of metabolism. Vegetables, legumes, fish, and red wine, which are all abundant in the Mediterranean diet, serves as one form of protection through their antioxidant properties.

Berries Help Prevent Depression

Berries, a food option served in Norwegian and Finnish cuisine, offer healthy benefits despite being such small fruits. Berries such as raspberries, blueberries, and lingonberries are packed with polyphenols, which are rich in antioxidants. These antioxidants firmly lower inflammatory markers that increase when depressed. These sweet and pleasantly sour fruits not only taste great but also support a healthy mind!

If there is room for improvement in your current diet, adopting a few of the above-mentioned diets can assist your mental well-being.

The Effects of Chewing

As mentioned earlier in the discussion of nutrients, the state of our body is deeply connected to the health of our minds. The act of “chewing” that accompanies eating also has a very positive effect. A lot of research has been done on the relationship between chewing and brain hormone secretion. When a person feels psychological stress, the brain produces an excess of dopamine, which causes anxiety, fear, and other unpleasant symptoms. Chewing thoroughly during a meal dramatically increases blood flow to parts of the brain, releasing a hormone called CCK-8. This hormone reduces the effects of dopamine and reduces the feelings of fear and restlessness. This hormone also has a memory-enhancing effect.

If you want to reap the mental benefits of chewing without increasing your calorie intake, gum is the way to go. It’s gentle on your teeth and can help you fight drowsiness. It’s a great item to carry when you feel anxious or sleepy during the day.

Happy Eating with Healthy Food Options !

Eating is an essential part of our lives, and cooking has been studied since ancient times to make food more enjoyable. This article has talked about the benefits of food from a scientific perspective, but at the end of the day, there is nothing greater than the pleasure of eating delicious foods. Cooking is a well-established hobby that can be practiced every day. We can really get into the details of quality ingredients to the seasoning preferred or figuring the best methods to prepare a dish. With fewer means of entertainment during this pandemic, cooking is a great hobby choice to begin.

This article mentioned how diet can be beneficial to our minds in various ways. We can all aim for a healthier diet to make our lives a little more colorful while we keep indoors.

→ Looking to improve your mental health? Try the SELF MIND app FREE for 1 week!
If you’re looking for more tips on how to care for your mental health, check out some of our past blog posts!

Reference:
Funakoshi, M. (1996) Mastication and Mental Health. Journal of Japanese Society for Mastication Science and Health Promotion, 6(1), 35-38. doi: 10.14858/soshaku1991.6.35

Matsuoka, Y., & Hamazaki, K. (2016) Considering Mental Health from the Viewpoint of Diet: The Role and Possibilities of Nutritional Psychiatry. The Japanese Society of Psychiatry and Neurology, 118(12), 880-894.

Yasuhiro, N., Kishio, S., & Funakoshi, M. (1993). Effect of gum chewing on arousal in a self-reported psychologicall test. Journal of Japanese Society for Mastication Science and Health Promotion, 3(1), 23-26. doi: 10.14858/soshaku1991.3.23

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