A good diet is essential for maintaining health. However, specific frames of emotional changes can generate an unbalanced relationship with food, generating excessive concern for the body and dysfunctional behaviors that lead to eating disorders (EDs).
Eating disorder can affect anyone regardless of ethnicity, age, or gender. They can cause severe problems in the carrier’s professional, school and social performance and affect the whole family.
Eating disorders have now become a severe case of public health worldwide, affecting 1% of the planet’s population, around 70 million people, and most of this universe is composed of younger women.
The most common EDs are anorexia above and Bulimia, but several others are not so well known to the public but also cause significant health problems. And while eating disorders can be successfully treated, only one in 10 people receive the correct treatment.
Therefore, learning to identify and know when it is time to seek medical attention is necessary.
The Ten Most Common Disorders
Anorexia Nervosa :
The person starts to have a fixed thought that “we need to lose weight”, and food becomes a threat. Throughout the disease, restricting food intake or even simply not eating is the primary goal of life. It is one of the disorders with the highest risk of death.
Bulimia:
The main characteristic is episodes of binge eating; the person ingests food uncontrolled and then feels terrible and guilty for this behavior. Then he seeks to compensate for this lack of control by fasting, vomiting or exercising in an attempt to burn the calories ingested.
Eating Compulsion:
It is similar to Bulimia in terms of overeating food at a given time but without the behavior of trying to expel the food out of alleged guilt. Most patients are almost always overweight than those with Bulimia and live on weight loss diets.
Purgative Disorder:
In it, there is no uncontrolled food intake as in Bulimia. Still, a constant search to eliminate what you eat, to lose weight, with drugs such as diuretics, laxatives, formulas, teas, and even forcing vomiting.
Night Eating Syndrome:
The person claims not to be hungry during the day, ingesting almost 75% of their daily calorie quota at night. It is a disorder associated with depression and poor sleep quality.
Addition By Food:
It is when the person says he is “addicted to food”, as if he were in a constant and insatiable search for some foods and reaching the point of developing irritation and emotional imbalance when he does not have access to these foods.
Orthorexia:
It’s the disorder of “correct eating”. The person wants to eat only certain foods that he considers healthy.
Pinch:
Constantly eating small portions of food outside the traditional times of large meals generates weight gain. It can be linked to anxiety or depression.
Vigorexia:
The exaggerated search for an “athletic and muscular body” causes the person to seek excess intake of proteins and food supplements, which can harm health.
Drunkorexia:
It is the disorder in which the person starts to restrict what he is going to eat to drink alcohol in large quantities, in a kind of “caloric compensation”: eat less, drink more. It usually attacks young people with anorexia or Bulimia.
Factorexy:
In this framework, people are obese but cannot admit it, believing they are within the ideal weight. For some experts, it would be the “opposite” of anorexia.
There is also the issue of nutrition: a nutrition professional, working with the person and understanding that person and how they experience their binge and food restriction, can help regularize and understand this in a practical way. We also have the importance of the physical educator because many of these people start to use physical exercise to regulate their emotional suffering. Depending on the case, we also need a clinical doctor, an endocrinologist or a neurologist, for example, depending on an eating disorder, such as severe bulimia or heart or kidney problems.
When we make this message about eating disorders, we need to communicate to the population that it’s not a frivolity, it’s not a lack of shame for those who are struggling with weight and have a phase of compensation and even people who suffer over time. In life, they can have help and understanding, finally using it to their advantage and not against themselves.
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