Compulsive Overeating and Diabetes

The behavior of compulsive overeating leads to the condition of being overweight, which is a heavily cited factor in the development of the blood sugar disease known as diabetes. Type II diabetes, which is the form of the disease usually diagnosed in adults who have a compulsive overeating disorder, features symptoms including blurred vision, increased urination, and infections in the feet and legs. Diabetes can also result in a variety of complications, including kidney failure, heart problems, and blindness. The first step in avoiding diabetes is to stop compulsive overeating. The best way to prevent compulsive overeating is to understand the psychological factors involved, eliminate the behavior, and ultimately prevent the development of the crippling and life-long disease of diabetes.

What is Diabetes?

Diabetes is essentially a surplus of glucose, or sugar, in the blood. Insulin, which is created by the pancreas, normally combats the oversupply of glucose in the blood of healthy people. However, in a patient with diabetes, the pancreas is unable to supply insulin, requiring the patient to seek outside insulin injections. Because there is no pill form of insulin, injections and a newly proposed nasal spray are the only methods of receiving insulin. Diabetes is painful and incurable, and can only be managed through a lifetime of maintaining one's insulin level with timed injections.

Diabetes has three primary forms, gestational, Type I and Type II. While both gestational and Type I diabetes are conditions inherited from birth, Type II is generally easily avoidable if you can control compulsive overeating and get enough exercise. Once you have become overweight or obese, the chances that you will develop diabetes increase dramatically.

How Compulsive Overeating Contributes to Diabetes

Compulsive overeating increases your risk of developing Type II diabetes because you are building a reserve of more and more unused calories, which subsequently turns into fat. This excessive build up of fat can lead to the development of excess glucose and ketones. These warning signs are used to detect the disease in diabetes screenings. A lack of exercise and a high blood cholesterol level are also dangerous contributing factors. Compulsive overeating exponentially increases your chances of developing cholesterol, while the correspondingly low level of energy most overweight people experience discourages you from exercising.

Preventing Compulsive Overeating

Receiving effective compulsive overeating treatment involves understanding why you compulsively overeat, and how you can begin to change your behavior so you can reduce your chances of developing diabetes.

Putting yourself on a diet without understanding the root causes of overeating will not make your problem go away; it will offer, at best, a temporary abatement. Treating compulsive overeating is about transforming your frame of mind; often, psychological factors are the major influence behind the kind and amount of food that you eat. Changing your consumption habits so you start eating healthy foods in regular, not excessive portions, will help you control your weight.

Diabetes, once it has developed, is incurable; but changing your eating habits and mental attitude to prevent compulsive overeating is something you can start to do today.