Michigan State University Professor Kelly Klump is available to talk about eating disorders as they relate to food during the holidays.
‘Tis the season of an abundance of food and drink. While celebrating should be joyful, for some women it can trigger eating disorder symptoms.
It is well known women undergo monthly hormonal changes in estrogen and progesterone due to the menstrual cycle. However, new data show these changes can cause women to eat more in the second half of their cycle. Women are biologically wired to increase their food intake during this time in preparation for pregnancy – it’s supposed to happen.
Quotes from Prof. Klump:“These natural hormonal changes can trigger emotional eating and binge eating in all women, but especially in women who are vulnerable to eating disorders,” Klump said. “In a society that overwhelmingly views women’s increased eating negatively, the reality is that this natural cycle can leave women vulnerable to eating disorders like bulimia nervosa and binge eating disorder.”
"The holidays can be a particularly risky time, as the holiday temptations and stress can increase the chances that emotional eating (i.e., the tendency to over-consume food while experiencing negative emotions) and/or binge eating occur. Unfortunately, these eating episodes can intensify concerns and obsessions with body weight that further increase the risk of developing an eating disorder."
“It’s an issue year-round, but it can be especially problematic during the holidays,” Klump said. “If we lived in a society in which eating and body weight were not stigmatized in women, these holiday temptations would be much less likely to cause problems/concerns.”
Bio:Kelly Klump is pioneering research that is changing people’s mindsets about the causes of eating disorders. It has been long believed that eating disorders were the result of psychosocial and cultural risk factors that often peak in women during puberty. Kelly has discovered that those factors alone do not cause these serious disorders. Kelly is an MSU Foundation Professor in the Psychology Department at Michigan State University. She co-founded the Michigan State University Twin Registry, a population-based twin registry that includes over 25,000 twins.
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