Thursday, 11 March 2010
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Have You Ever Experienced Pica?
Pica is the want to eat something that is not really "edible." A few of the more common picas are ice, paper and clay picas. I suppose I have the more normal of the three. At least it's only water.
I was introduced to crushed ice when I was 9 years old. I don't know why I remember it. I just remember being at the nursing home my mom worked in at the time and she filled a cup with some little tiny pieces of ice. Cool! Then I noticed that she chewed on them after drinking all her drink....so I did to! The rest is history as they say.
It's 12 years later now, and I'm lucky I still have teeth. I still do it, and it is not just habit, as I have sincerely tried to not do it since I know it's
1. annoying to hear if you aren't me
2. bad bad bad for your teethI still get an overwhelming want to have those tiny cold chips however. I can stop if i want to, so it's not true addiction really. But usually I notice that my mouth feels hot. Not just...normal body temperature hot, sort of like right after you have soup. Ice cream doesn't cut it, nor yogurt, nor anything else that is almost but not quite as cold as ice by itself. My mouth just gets the hot feeling right back again after I finish eating. It seems to be a need for both the horribly crunchy texture and the ridiculously cold temperature. I will literally fill a cup with ice, and chomp on it, no drink required.
Now, I have heard many reasons as to why I could have this pica. The first one I heard when I was about 13...my friends said I was..." sexually frustrated" was the exact wording I believe. OK...I was 13. I barely even liked the idea of boys yet so I pretty much discounted that even as it came out of their mouths. Granted, I no longer allowed myself the icy treat around around my sexually assuming friends.
Later, I heard that it can be because of a deficiency in iron or just because you are dehydrated. Well as I said, no drink is required, so I doubt its dehydration. The anemia is far more plausible, as my mom has always been anemic and I think it might be partially genetic. However, the more iron I take in, the more I seem to get the pica!! I gave up on that idea after iron tablets started upsetting my stomach. I have no other symptoms of anemia. No passing out, no tiredness...nothing really. So I am still left in the dark as to the cause and cure for this weird little psuedo-addiction.
Does anyone else have this sort of pica or ever experienced pica? What do you do to quell it?
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Comments (37)
I use to eat my boogers, but then I stopped at around the age of 10 I think.
fortunately I don't. at least not anymore.
I'm an occasional ice cruncher and more occasional paper nibbler. I've also been known to pull the farm boy look with some sort of blade or stalk of vegetation hanging out of my mouth.
I had a long battle with eating disorders from age 13 to age 26. Early in my disorder, I ate a lot of paper... I also ate a few other things at the time.. small chunks of rubber, plastic...
When I was pregnant (don't worry, my eating disorder issues were gone, I had a healthy baby and pregnancy) I craved one weird thing.. I wouldn't call it non edible, but I wouldn't suggest eating it either. Everytime I was around bacon (or the smell of it) I wanted to eat it... RAW!! I never did, but I craved it like crazy.
Most Dentists DDS DDM etc. would much rather see their patients chewing gum than eating Ice.
I craved crushed ice throughout both of my pregnancies, and occasionally still do, but I find it's more when I'm dehydrated that I want ice. Like water (or other liquids) just go through me too quickly? So ice lasted longer?
hmm, i didn't know crushed ice was PICA. i thought it was like, if you ate stuff that really wasn't edible (or drinkable). like one of my rats eats cardboard and paper alot (she frequently chews holes in my homework..thanks ratty). i also had a friend when i was a kid who used to eat whole sticks of flavoured chapstick.
i do chew ice occassionally but i don't consider myself to have PICA.. i also chew all my pen caps to death but that's an anxiety thing, not because i'm actually trying to eat them.
I had a bought of PICA when I was active in my eating disorder and inpatient. I would have incessant needs to eat tooth paste, flavored lotion, suck on crayola markers and want to eat clay in pottery class. The only thing I ended up doing was ingesting some tooth paste. I think it would have been more normal like ice chips and weird foods, had I been in more normal circumstances where those things were openly available to me. But they ran some blood tests and found out I had a type of iron deficiency... they put me on supplements and the cravings disappeared.
@FireYourBoss@xanga - LOL!
I don't really have one. Things that aren't edible in my mouth make me want to gag. Especially paper.
Try eating frozen fruit. And with the dehydrated thing... did you actually try stopping the ice-eating and having big cups of water throughout the day? Like, drinking water when you get that 'urge' for ice. I enjoy ice crunching too, but my fridge doesn't make the nice mashed kind of ice, so I'm not as tempted and eat the frozen raspberries my family buys in bulk from Oregon instead. :)
Interesting. I haven't had anything like this.
Don't be ridiculous. A pica is 1/6th of an inch, and made up of 12 points. Thus, 72 points to one pica or one inch. Everybody knows that. lol. :D
Anemia isn't just an iron deficiency, It's a lack of red blood cells. It can be caused by not getting enough Vitamin B12 or Folic Acid. You should look into those.
i chew on ice too and i'm anemic. i don't do a cup at a time though
addiction is not defined by an urge to intake something, addiction is marked by tolerance, withdrawal. tolerance means you need more of the same substance to reach the desired outcome, meaning you would need to have more and more and more ice chips. withdrawal means that if you go without the substance, your body would get physically sick from lacking it.
pica is a mental illness per the DSM IV
why is ice considered not edible? i mean it might not be good for your teeth but neither is candy and that's considered valid
im a maneater. bahahaha.
eatting ice is bad for you??? O______O I used to really love eatting ice in my teen years..
I've craved soap before. Totally weird I know, but I smelled plain old Dial soap as a kid, and decided that I always wanted to eat it because it smelled SO good. Turns out, it's disgusting, if you didn't already know.
And yeah, I chew on crushed iced all the time. Especially if it's the tiny little squares that most places don't have :(
im slightly anemic. but ince ive taken supplements im better. i eat a cup or 2 say once or twice a week
Um well I don't have the urge to actually eat it, but the sight of velcro makes me want to chew it so bad! I used to gnaw on the rough side of velcro and some days, I still "crave" it lol.
This is something very few people know about me, so I'm switching to anonymous. For about a year I struggled with an irrepressible craving for clay dirt. Sometimes smelling it would trigger it, sometimes just seeing a hillside. Often I would be trying to do homework or read a novel and the desire would build such that I would read the same word over and over again. It was intense. And yes, I did succumb several times. I couldn't help it. I knew it was potentially harmful, but just a bite or two would take away the craving. I finally started to change my diet to contain more leafy greens, got some food-based iron supplements and increased my intake of b-vitamin containing foods. The craving slowly waned and finally went away.
I probably should have gone to see a doctor about it, but I was not on insurance on the time, I was embarrassed, and I thought I could probably control it with food. This eventually worked for me, but if I could go back I would have definitely found a way to see a doctor or nutritionist about it.
yes, sometimes I get a craving to chew ice :) especially ice cubes that come from the square-ish ice molds...but I had a hard time fitting them in my mouth (ahaha, that sounds wrong :P)
I LOVE CRUSHED ICE. all of my friends think i'm crazy. like you said...i could eat whole glasses of it at a time. i prefer it precrushed? but it has never stopped me from biting whole ice cubes. my sympathy (from experience) goes out to your teeth :]
new paper and wet mud... :D