Endeavors magazine: Bingeing with Baby

Bingeing with Baby

For some women, pregnancy triggers out-of-control eating.

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[filed under: health & medicine; article date: january 2008]

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When you’re pregnant, simple cravings and extra snacks are par for the course, Cynthia Bulik says. It’s when your eating gets out of control that you need to worry.

In a study of 41,000 pregnant women, Bulik and her colleagues at Carolina and the Norwegian Institute of Public Health found that many women who had never had an eating disorder developed one — in this case, binge eating disorder — after they became pregnant.

Doctors already knew that women who’ve been living with an eating disorder sometimes find that it goes into remission during their pregnancy. But Bulik and her colleagues found that women who already had binge eating disorder were more likely to continue bingeing than they were to go into remission.

The main difference between binge eating disorder and plain old overeating, Bulik says, is that people with the disorder tend to lose control, quickly consuming huge portions on a regular basis, even when they’re not hungry. They eat until they’re past the point of being full and, unlike people with bulimia nervosa, binge eaters don’t purge what they’ve eaten.

Health care professionals should be on the lookout for unhealthy changes in eating habits in pregnant women, Bulik says, especially those women with lower levels of education and income. “It’s possible,” she says, “that pregnancy is even more stressful for women with poorer social support and resources.”

Cynthia Bulik is a professor of eating disorders in the School of Medicine and in the department of nutrition in the School of Public Health. Other UNC authors of the study, which was published in the August 2007 issue of Psychological Medicine, include biostatistician Ann Von Holle, professor of psychiatry Robert Hamer, associate professor of nutrition and epidemiology Anna Maria Siega-Riz, and professor of psychiatry and genetics Patrick F. Sullivan.