What are they?
An eating disorder is a clinical diagnosis that may be made
when strange thinking about food and eating increases to the point where it
affects your life. People that suffer this disorder, become extremely worried
and concerned about the appearance of their body and their weight and look “fat”
or with excess weight. They
can include severe overeating or not consuming enough food to stay healthy.
This is a complex psychological disease, which alters
the perception of the body, and which can only be treated by a doctor or mental
health professional.
Causes of eating disorders
There is no clear cause for eating
disorders. It involves individual factors, the family environment and cultural
factors; however, these kinds of disorders are more usual in teenagers, because
youth is a stage of emotional and physical changes, and young people become
more vulnerable to suffer them.
Next
there is a list with some factors:
Individual factors:
-Setting
unrealistic goals that the person believes will bring love and respect from
family and friends,
-Having
low self-esteem - this can be hard to see because some people seem to be really
'together' on the outside, even when they are feeling bad inside.
Family factors:
-Some problems in the relationship between parents and
children could affect to the person feel unvalued and alone.
-Pressure from parents, to be good at school or sport,
have a well behavior, look attractive; can have an impact in some teenagers,
which feel worthless if they do not fulfill the family’s expectations.
-Our society is full of messages that says us that we
have to be thin and beautiful, because that brings happiness and successful. Especially
in women, that most of the time they have to be thin for their careers (models,
dancers and athletes), and for that reason they develop these disorders.
-But this is not only concerned to women, men are also
suffering eating disorders, guide for the men’s images, they have to be muscular
to be attractive to women and achieve
their goals
-As we can see
in the images, the canon of beauty has evolved, in the 50’s woman, like Marilyn
Monroe and Brigitte bardot w
-Anorexia nervosa : in which young people believe that they are
fat, even when they are not and may have lost a lot of weight.
-Bulimia nervosa: which involves periods of overeating
because they have been starving themselves, followed by purging, that conduct
them to take laxatives to make themselves poo to excess, or forced vomiting,
or make exercises to extreme.
-Binge eating disorder – where the young person
has times when they eat very large
amounts of food but do not vomit, purge or exercise to 'work it off'.
-Compulsive overeating – where they are constantly
overeating to make themselves feel better. Food is used as a replacement for
what is missing.
Eating disorders can lead to the development of
serious physical health problems, such as:
With
anorexia, the body goes into starvation mode, and the lack of nutrition can
affect the body in many ways:
-A drop in blood pressure, pulse, and breathing rate
-Hair loss and fingernail breakage
-Loss of periods
-Lanugo hair — a soft hair that can grow all over the
skin
-Lightheadedness and inability to concentrate
-Anemia
-Swollen joints
-Brittle bones
With
bulimia, constant vomiting and lack of nutrients can cause these problems:
-Constant stomach pain
-Damage to the stomach and kidneys
-Tooth decay (from exposure to stomach acids)
"-Chipmunk cheeks," when the salivary glands
permanently expand from throwing up so often
-Loss of periods
-Loss of the mineral potassium
-A person with binge
eating disorder who gains a lot of weight is at risk of developing diabetes and
heart disease,
Also these disorders affect the emotional side of the
person, leaving deep scars, so, for these people is very hard to recover a healthy
health condition,some of them die for all these complications .
Sources:
