The Nocturnal Eating Syndrome (NED)

It is one of the eating disorders (like nervous bulimia and the periodic eating compulsion) that can be found in obese patients. Like the other eating disorders, it can be responsible for the difficulty some patients have to adhere to the treatment and reach ideal weight. Patients with this syndrome present a characteristic eating behavior and, many times, impressive.

It happens as an eating disorder with three main components:
- Morning anorexia (total lack of appetite in the morning);
- Evening or nocturnal hyperfagi, when wide awake (great ingestion of food during the night);
- Insomnia;

The frequency of NED varies between 1.5% in the general population, going through 9.0% in obesity treatment clinics, and reached 26.0% in patients with morbid obesity.

Patients with NED usually eat more than 55% of the total daily calories between 8 PM and 6 AM, wake up several times during the night, more than half the times only to eat, and present an important aggravation in humor at night.

Therefore, NED is a unique combination of an eating, sleep, and humor disorder.
Even though there is no specific treatment, many approaches are made, inclusive, to consider the obese people not as people with lack of will power, but as holders of an innate biological vulnerability, and to recognize the eating disorder will enable the evaluation and the treatment planning more rationally and individually.

compulsive eating disorder “Binge-eating disorder”

The compulsive eating disorder (“binge-eating disorder”), in which patients present fagic voracity moments (bulimic moments) but without using purgative methods afterward, like when it happens in Nervous Bulimia.
In the compulsive eating disorder there is no morbid and irrational worry about the weight and body shape, same as in Bulimia and Anorexia. These patients are obese most of the time and seem to distinguish from obese people that do not present these compulsive eating moment because they present more psychiatric morbidity and by the fact that obesity is more serious.

The compulsive eating disorder happens to three women for every two men and has a prevalence of 2% in the general population and of 30% among obese people that look for treatment to lose weight.
People with this disorder present frequent crises, during which they feel they cannot stop eating. They eat fast and hide, or eat during the whole day. Even though these patients feel guilty and embarrassed by their lack of control, they do not present compensatory and compulsive behavior (vomits, laxatives...) typical of bulimic patients.

They usually have a complete failure history in several diets to lose weight. Usually they are depressive and obese people.

This uncontrollable nourishment compulsion makes patients ingest exaggerated food quantities in a short period of time. These eating attacks (binge eating) should occur with a minimum frequency of 2 times a week so that the syndrome can be diagnosed.

The Compulsive Eating characteristics are:

Repeated “eating attack” moments

Eat much faster than normal

Eat until they feel uncomfortably stuffed

Eat great amounts of food, even not being hungry

Eat alone, embarrassed by the amount

Feel guilty and/or depressed after the moment