Most eating disorders are related in same form. Eating disorders can cause a person to lose severe weight and cause a person to wither away; they can also cause a person to drive themselves to binge and purge; it may also drive a person to put on dramatic weight in a short period of time. These disorders are in respective order are Anorexia nervosa, Bulimia nervosa, and Obesity. Eating disorders are a major problem in society today, and yet they all start with similar properties.
The first eating disorder is Anorexia nervosa, which is a prolonged loss of appetite due to a pathological fear of weight gain. This disorder is more common among teenagers and young girls then in males. The reason for this is that the media and society has picked the image of what young girls should yearn for. The dangers behind this are that to reach this unachievable goal is that the young women will have to starve their body of nutrients which enable them to grow.
According to the author of Eating Disorders a Hot Issue, David Goodnough (1999) believes that Anorexia could begin with a person’s feeling about her weight. She might feel that she would look better if she had lost a few pounds. Perhaps she may want to look like some person she admires who weighs less than she does. Over time she may think that she can improve herself by losing weight. So the way she does this is by stop eating all together. This works for a time but will lead to problems if reoccurring.
The body needs at least 1500 calories a day to function properly if this is not met the body will start cannibalizing itself to meet the required amount of energy to go through the day. Anorexics take in fewer than 600 calories per day. This severe dieting cause’s extreme diminishes in weight, and a skeleton like appearance, which is life threatening. The facial swelling due to parotid hypertrophy contrasts with the rest of the body (Aimee, 2007).
Some personnel signs of anorexia are that one is preoccupied with food cooking enmorse amounts of food only to serve it to other people or throwing out; they also study diets, calories, collect recipes. Even though they lack little energy anorexics try to stay very active to conceal the illness. Anorexics often go in spells of exercising periods trying to reach that unachievable goal there dream weight.
Anorexia nervosa is a mental disorder that “results in an avoidance of eating because of a cluster of specific emotional issues.” (Barry, 2002) The onset typically occurs during adolescence and it mostly affects young women. Anorexia is characterized by extreme and irrational fear of becoming fat, significant weight loss of 15% or more of the normal weight, distorted body image and amenorrhea or absence of at least three consecutive menstrual cycles. (Eysenck, 2000)
Excessive weight loss is accomplished by restricting food intake of less than 1,000 calories per day, excessive exercise, diet pills or even self-induced Bulimia nervosa, on the other hand, is an “episodic, uncontrolled, compulsive, rapid ingestion of large quantities of food over a short period of time (binging), followed by inappropriate compensatory behaviors to rid the body of the excess calories (purging).” (Vervaet, 2004)
When one has Anorexia they might not look at themselves as a whole being fat, they just look at a single part on their body such as hips, arms, stomach, etc. Most of the time anorexics know they are skinny but need to pick something out like a body part so they can continue their vesting. As one girl said in the book Eating Disorders the Facts by Suzanne Abraham, Derek Llewellyn-Jones, (2001), “I’ve spoken to other anorexics and they realize just as I realize that at our lowest weights, we all knew we were damn thin.
You’d have to pretty stupid to think that you were not, but you have to hide it because if you let on to the doctors that on you know you are thin, they will want to put weight on you. “This is a great example of the difficulty to treat anorexics”. In order to treat anorexics you have to fix the mentality before you can try to, “put weight on them”, because if you don’t they will never be satisfied.
Also there has to be treatment for the psychological component of anorexia, a look at the family make up and the expectations of the parents towards the anorexic, as a popular opinion at this time is that the anorexic is rebelling against high expectations set forth by parents.