Fit & Well Idaho Report: Eating Disorders Awareness Week

TWIN FALLS, Idaho (KMVT/KSVT) — February 26th through March 3rd, 2024 is Eating Disorders Awareness Week. As a way to help us recognize, support and effectively treat eating disorders.

Public awareness is key to addressing this widespread issue. St. Luke’s wants to make it know that eating disorders are very real and are a life-threatening mental and physical illness.

They involve emotions, attitudes, and behaviors surrounding weight, food and size that severely impair functioning in major areas of life and can have fatal consequences. KMVT spoke with a St. Lukes clinical dietician, who is currently treating around 35 people in the Magic Valley with eating disorders.

“The cause of eating disorders physiologically can be from a lot of things, whether its genetic, social, environmental, all of those things,” said Katherine Alper.

“When it comes to triggers more specifically, that’s more patient dependent, so some patients may come from a trauma background and that’s what triggers the behaviors, where as another person had an experience eating food and that cause them to have an apprehension to food, but it had nothing to do with the external circumstances.”

Eating disorders are mostly common between teens starting around the age of 12 and in young adults around the age of 25. It is estimated that 28.8 million people will have an eating disorder in their lifetime.

If you’d like more information on this topic, visit online at www.stlukes.org.

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