What are Eating Disorders?
Eating disorders involve extreme attitudes, emotions, and behaviors regarding weight and food. The most common food disorders are anorexia and bulimia.
Anorexia (Anorexia Nervosa) is when people have a serious fear of gaining weight, and as a result, they do whatever it takes to not gain any weight. This results in very unhealthy habits that can cause one to become intensely thin. People starve themselves because of a deep fear of gaining weight.
Some symptoms of anorexia are:
Being underweight because you don't eat enough
Loss of hair air
Constipation
Trouble sleeping
Dehydration
Frequent faintness, tiredness, and weak muscles
Death
Bulimia (Bulimia Nervosa) is a condition that involves binging on food, followed by forcefully vomiting. Simply vomiting and/or using different teas/pills to frequently force yourself to have unnatural bowel movements in efforts to lose unrealistic amounts of weight are also under this umbrella.
This disorder is known to affect mostly women and teens.
Some symptoms are:
Eating more food than most people can eat in a short period of time
Frequently trying to get rid of calories by exercising too much, vomiting, or misusing laxatives
Feeling loss of control over how much or how often you eat
Thinking about food, dieting, or the appearance of your body so much that it distracts you from your daily life tasks
Eating disorders can in fact be fatal. Your body needs its nutrients to survive. Failure to provide your body with what it needs can result in the failure of certain organs which can ultimately result in death or other long term conditions that are not reversible.
In many cases, eating disorders will develop in people that suffer from other mental health illnesses; such as anxiety, panic, obsessive-compulsive disorder, and alcohol/drug abuse problems.
There is medical and scientific evidence that anorexia and bulimia are just as heritable as the biologically based mental illnesses (e.g. schizophrenia, bipolar disorder and depression).
More than 70 million people suffer from eating disorders across the world!
10-15% of all Americans suffer from some type of serious eating disorder
61% of American adults are either overweight or obese.
If you or a loved one are suffering from an eating disorder, here are some resources that could be very helpful: