Eating Disorders and Personal Finance

Eating Disorders can cause havoc in your finances in more ways than you may know. They can cost you money with lost income, added expenses, and emergency services. They can influence life events, interrupt your pursuit of affluence, and reshape your long-range dreams, like retirement.

For better or worse, eating disorders are part of life. Here are the top disorders:

• Anorexia Nervosa: Restriction of food intake. 
• Bulimia Nervosa: Binge eating followed by a purge. 
• Binge Eating Disorder: Binge eating without a following purge. 

People with eating disorders are often at their proper body weight but use unusual methods to maintain it. The three types of eating disorders affect personal finances in different ways. 

What Factors are Affected?

Here’s what eating disorders cost in personal finance: 

• individual and family productivity losses
• Cost of losing years of retirement, or to die early or before retirement. 
• The increased cost of food
• unemployment angst
• excess health care costs

Individual and Family Productivity Losses

Eating disorders can create lousy behavior at work, including perfectionism, alienation from eating events and other social events. Anorexia may deliver such a low-calorie count that the individual with anorexia may be less productive. 

Denial can make addressing an eating disorder complex, further exacerbating the problem of productivity in the workplace. Malnourished workers are not necessarily more productive workers. Eating can be such a problem for many people, even people who don’t have an eating disorder, so imagine what it’s like to deal with an eating disorder when you’re trying to pursue work or a career. 

In addition, many eating disorders are believed to be preordained by genetics. Can you imagine how difficult it is to rid yourself of a problem caused by your genes?

Cost of Losing Years of Your Retirement  

Many people die deaths that are attributed to eating disorders, as well as the suicide rate is higher for people with eating disorders. So, suppose you’re looking forward to retirement years. In that case, you might want to motivate and confront your eating disability if you suffer from one. 

One plus for people saving for retirement is that eating disorders primarily start during youth or young adulthood. The older you get, the more effective eating disorder treatments can be. You can better tackle an eating disorder later in life. However, there’s some hard work ahead to make up for any losses experienced from an eating disorder. 

It can also become part of a patient’s pill-taking regimen, complicating old-age life. Eating disorders cause depression and social anxiety, and people may use prescription drugs to find a solution.

Increase in Cost of Food  

For people on a budget, binge eating increases your actual dollars available for food. Binge eaters can eat as much as ten times the daily allowance in calories of food of non-binge eaters. So, you usually eat 1500 calories a day. In that case, binge eating will drive up to 15,000 calories daily, traditionally consumed in a short stretch of your day. The money loss is the same whether the food is purged or not. Imagine a typical food budget, then multiply it by ten. That’s the direct cost of binge eating in grocery costs and restaurant bills.

In addition, exercise offsets the enormous calorie intake, so add the extra cost of a gym to the price of binge eating. The obsessive behavior displayed in binge eating may cause an eater to turn to gyms for a solution rather than just taking a walk, an inexpensive behavior by comparison. Gyms may seem a more aggressive or effective way to lose weight.

Unemployment Angst  

Eating disorders can affect employment by causing workers to skip the proper nutrition, and that causes their energy levels to fall off. This leads to less productivity. If an eating disorder is severe enough to reduce productivity at work, it can be considered a disability.

Recent studies have shown that eating disabilities affect the ability of subjects to complete tasks, meet acceptable attendance, and affect the perception of the subject’s ability to fulfill their job requirements. This reduces productivity and causes unemployment. 

Suppose sick time or sick pensions are available in the workplace. In that case, people with eating disorders might take advantage of these benefits more than those who do not suffer from eating disorders. 

Excess Health Care Costs  

Studies show that an eating disorder costs people almost $12,000 per year in health care costs, above and beyond ordinary expenditures. Medicare sees patients with eating disorders, and their health care costs are higher than the health care of people with healthy eating habits. 

People admitted to a hospital with an eating disorder are often malnourished, or their radical weight loss has put them at risk of some life-threatening syndromes. People with eating disorders often lack solid socialization, making relapses more likely, and subjects have shown little desire to recover.

Are People with Eating Disorders Self-Centered?  

Self-centered people are often labeled narcissistic. Selfish people have eating disorders like anorexia or bulimia. They are obsessed with their weight because they have an issue with perfect body image. This affects their personal life, and that likely affects personal finances. 

Selfish people can be terrible in relationships, especially in financing their way of life. 4 Narcissistic people shun employment opportunities. They may horde money in the household for themselves or refuse to pay their share of expenses. They can also refuse to provide for a mate in relationships like marriage. 

Selfish people may spend all their money on vanity and have little to pay for day-to-day expenses. They’re also big tippers, meaning they add even more cost to the expense of eating out because big tips win the wait staff’s attention. They’re also known to be big gift-givers to friends for the same reason: increasing expenses. 

Eating Disorders May Start with a Lack of Self-Esteem  

People who are overly critical of their looks try to fix the problem by changing their eating behavior, leading to an eating disorder. If you have an eating disorder, there are people and resources to contact for help. To start with, contact a nutritionist or a dietician 11 for advice. Follow professional proposals to solve the problem. 

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