Appetite Increasing Herbs for Eating Disorders
Those of us with normal eating habits should never take the joy of eating for granted because for some people, eating can be the horrific experience to dread every day. If I told you how much I eat now, you’d probably never believe me that I had trouble just eating a piece of watermelon in 2007. Though m eating problems never was about weight or control, it still frightened me and family.
During high anxiety periods, my stomach was constantly getting nausea for no reason. One day, I happened t get it right before I ate, so from then on, every single time I was told “dinner’s ready”, I would go in a panic. Soon, eating was the scariest thing in the entire day. At that point, I coped by trying to eat more when I wasn’t anxious so I didn’t have to eat at night. During anxiety, it felt as if anything I ate would make me throw up, and as an emetophobic, that was unthinkable.
Appetite is a weird thing. The more you eat, you seem to be able to eat more and if you don’t eat, your stomach shrinks and you no longer feel hungry
This can be pretty dangerous either ways, if you restrict food, you may be cutting off a lot of nutrients which your body needs.
Two Herbs that Helped me Increase Appetite
- Dang Gui (Chinese Angelica Root)
- Ginger
Whether you’re suffering from anxiety or anything else, I’m sure you’ve all experienced times when you need to eat but you’re not hungry. These are the herbs that will really come in handy. If you’ve got kids who seem to never want to eat, it may help them as well!
Firstly, let me say that both taste rather horrible on their own. Angelica root is bitter as heck and ginger just taste really strange. At that time, I took dang gui in soup form and ginger in tablets.
Angelica Root
Angelica root is a blood toner which helps many problems ranging from anemia to menstrual disorders. The funny thing is, I don’t even really remember what I was taking it for, probably to decrease the pain during my curse week (that time of month) but somehow, it managed to work in a way which I had not expected. At that time, I was going through major panic and for lunch, even a small bowl of food took me a huge amount of effort to eat. After taking the angelica root, I immediately felt as if I wanted to eat more.
Ginger
Ginger has always had a warming effect on my stomach. It’s all because of ginger that I haven’t suffered from not eating properly during high anxiety periods. If I feel any discomfort to the stomach, I immediately take two pills and you literally feel the difference almost instantly. It works best if you just swallow it without any water. I could seriously say that ginger saved my life in helping me lead somewhat of a normal life without feeling as if I need to avoid places because of my random bouts of nausea caused by anxiety, usually triggered by fear of throwing up.
Where can you buy these herbs?
Ginger root should be available in nearly all pharmacies or health stores. There are capsule form, tablet for and tea. Tablets can be slightly harder to swallow but sometimes I chew it instead. capsule form would be my favourite because I can easily swallow it without water.
Dang Gui is also available in some health stores, under the name Dong Quai (sometimes). You can buy the actual root in Asian herbal stores.
