To Eat or Not to Eat Psy 240 Week 4

To Eat or Not to Eat

Good Afternoon everyone, thank you for joining us today for our discussion on eating disorders. For those of you who have not been here before my name is Ivy, I am the counselor here at Healthy Mind, Healthy Weight Center for Eating Disorders. Today we will be talking about Obesity/Anorexia and the reasons we eat or don’t eat. First I would like to start today’s session off talking about some of the physiological aspects of eating and why we really eat. There are many different theories of what tells us we need to eat. We get the feeling of hunger to signal when we need to eat.

As we all know we provide our self with food and that food is converted into energy. Once the food enters our body it starts what is called digestion. Digestion is a gastrointestinal process that breaks down food and absorbs the vitamins, minerals, and fats into the body. Once food is digested it is converted into energy and stored in three forms; fats, proteins, and glycogen. Energy is mostly stored as fat in the body for two reasons, one it holds more energy than glycogen and two glycogen holds more water, which would make the average person over 600 pounds. There are three phases that each person goes to through to metabolize energy (Pinel, 2009).

The cephalic phase is the first phase. The cephalic phase begins with the sight, smell, or thought of food. The cephalic stage ends once the food compounds are absorbed into the blood stream. The next phase is the absorptive phase, which begins when the compounds of food are absorbed into the blood stream and ends when the body’s energy needs are met. The last stage is the fasting stage, which all of the un-stored energy form the previous meal has been used up and reserves are being used to meet immediate energy needs. The fasting stage ends when the next cephalic stage begins (Pinel, 2009).

There is a theory called set-point theory. This is a theory that states that a person will become hungry only when their body...