This article talks about a recent study done by Dutch researchers showing a relationship between becoming obese and leading to depression, and depression leading to obesity.
Obesity, Luppino and colleagues found, increases the risk of depression in initially non-depressed individuals by 55 percent and depression increases the risk of obesity in initially normal-weight individuals by 58 percent.
The study was pretty massive. Pooling subjects from 15 published studies:
The studies, which collectively involved more than 58,000 people, used body mass index, or BMI, to gauge how fat or thin a person is. For reference, a US adult with a BMI of 25 or more is considered overweight, while one with a BMI of 30 and above is considered obese.
The study also showed though that it was a little different for people that are overweight but not obese.
Being overweight increased the risk of depression in initially non-depressed individuals somewhat, but depression did not increase the risk of being overweight over time.
All of this tends to make a lot of sense into how overeating and depression can go hand in hand and can lead to a downward spiral.
You become depressed, and you go to food to find some "emotional support." That food then leads to weight gain. You notice the weight gain and it makes you even more depressed about your body image, thus, leading you to eat more, and then being depressed more, etc.
When looking at the obesity epidemic, I've always thought that there was more to it than people just eating more and exercising less. That there was a deeper root cause and that maybe what we really had was a depression epidemic that was the underlying cause of the obesity epidemic (this somewhat relates to an addiction to food post that I talked about recently).
What about an approach to deal with the issue more? What if we started officially categorizing obesity as an eating/psychological disorder just like we do with anorexia and bulimia?
Essentially, it's the same thing: They are all eating disorders, they all have some kind of underlying psychological issues involved in them and eating (or not eating) is just the bio-product of it.
Roughly 1-5% of the population will be diagnosed with anorexia and/or bulimia, yet, it's estimated that ONE-THIRD of the US population is obese.
So again, why are we not treating this as an eating disorder?
It's good that we keep focusing on eduction when it comes to exercise and healthy food choices but, I think we really need to change focus a little bit and realize that there may be more "behind the scenes" when it comes to why we've become so overweight, so quickly.
I hope more is done to look into the connection between overeating and depression because I really think there's something to it.
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