Learn to influence appetite to lose weight
Rare hair-eating disorder can be fatal
IN RESPONSE to one of my columns, a reader wrote on Facebook: “How to lose weight – just don’t eat.” How I wish it were that simple. But it isn’t and that’s why so many people who become overweight struggle to shed the extra kilos. It’s also why many physical trainers, dieticians and nutritionists have thriving businesses.
I’ve come to believe that the reason losing weight is such hard work is that so many of us just don’t know what or how much we should be eating and how our bodies react to food.
When I attended Paleo f(x) in Austin, Texas earlier this year, health coach Erin Power told me she firmly believed that “task-orientated health advice just doesn’t work for most people” and that the biggest “aha moment” for many of her clients had been when they learned to listen to the signals their bodies were sending them and realised that responding to them in a way that achieved the desired results could be really easy.
This turned out to be an “aha moment” for me, because I was finally able to understand why my previous efforts to lose weight had failed.
I knew exactly how much of each food group I was allowed each day, how the different foods were categorised and how to measure a portion size. The missing link was the “why”. At the time I didn’t realise that.
Added to this, said Power, people cannot simply be told to “eat less, but need to be taught how to influence their appetites… how not to be hungry”.
One way to do this is to eat whole, nutrient dense food, with a focus on fresh fruit, vegetables and protein, rather than foods high in refined carbohydrates and sugars like crisps, sweets, sugary drinks and so on.
One of the comments I often get from people who follow me on Instagram is that my meals look delicious and that I eat “so much”. This of course, is informed by the misconception that eating healthy means eating tiny portions of food or bland, boring meals.
Not so. I love food and one of the greatest contributors to my weight loss success over the past year has been having fun, experimenting with delicious, home-cooked meals and trying out new recipes.
And then there’s something Paul Chek, an expert in corrective exercise and holistic lifestyle coaching, said that blew my mind. “Most people confuse hunger for thirst. And as a result, they eat when they should be drinking.”
But when I started paying attention to what happened when I felt the urge to eat (but was not necessarily hungry) and then drank some water, I realised Chek just might have been on to something. – Chantel Manuel AT SOME point you probably have seen someone who nibbles on hair unconsciously, usually in times of anxiety or stress.
This could develop into Rapunzel Syndrome – a rare intestinal condition in humans resulting from ingesting hair (trichophagia).
This happens when an extended trail of undigested hair extends and lies in the stomach and small intestine.
In a first for South Africa, a group of specialists from the Department of Surgery at Groote Schuur Hospital and Netcare Christiaan Barnard Memorial Hospital, have published a clinical series based on their treatment of five patients who presented with the condition.
Dr Galya Chinnery, head of the Upper Gastrointestinal Service at Groote Schuur said in SA they tracked five patients with Rapunzel Syndrome. The syndrome remains very rare, with only 30 reported cases internationally.
“A case series of five sounds small, but it’s significant in the context of international literature where I think the biggest case series is seven patients,” she said.
The series involved five female patients ranging from 12 to 27 years, who presented with a host of clinical symptoms, including early satiety, intermittent vomiting, abdominal pain and weight loss.
The study noted that all five trichobezoars – two of which consisted entirely of artificial hair extensions – extended into the small intestine, the longest measuring 1.4m.
“People do eat all sorts of strange things, more so if they are having some sought of psychiatric problems. We find that patients who eat their hair, usually do so in times of anxiety or periods of their lives where they feel a lot of stress,” said Chinnery.
The series was published because of the extreme rarity of this condition but also to raise awareness around it.
“What also makes our series a little bit different is that in our group of five patients, two of the patients were actually eating synthetic hair.
Septic
People don’t recognise that it’s not just a matter of the hair sitting in the stomach, there are severe complications,” said Chinnery.
Months before ending up at the surgical gastro-enterology unit at Groote Schuur, patients experienced stomach ache and abdominal pain and they were unable to finish a plate of food.
“By the time they came to us, there was a severe problem related to the physical mass of that hair either blocking the outlet of the stomach.
“That’s a serious issue in that your abdominal cavity now gets contaminated and it can get severely septic if you don’t sort that out, and then it becomes an emergency operation,” said Chinnery.