Coping with anorexia

COPING WITH ANOREXIA

Anorexia Nervosa, usually known only as anorexia, is an eating disorder characterized mainly for the extreme panic of gaining weight and the rejection of eating properly. People who suffer from anorexia start losing weight quickly by improperly dieting, self-induced vomiting, over-exercising or by using laxatives. Anorexia Nervosa affects millions of people in the UnitedStates each year. According to the National Institute of Mental Health between 0.5 and 3.7 percent of women in the United States suffer of this illness their life while a 5 to 15 percent of people who suffer of anorexia are males. Anorexia is the third most common cause of illness among adolescents and a 95 percent of those who have had anorexia are between the ages 12-25 years.

There are manytypes of eating disorders but the most common ones are: Anorexia Nervosa, Bulimia Nervosa, and Binge Eating. Since Anorexia nervosa is one of the most common causes of eating disorders that lead to the patients’ dead (5.9 percent of anorexic victims died from complications of the disease), this paper focuses only on Anorexia Nervosa in adolescents and the prevention of this illness. As an eatingbut primarily psychological disorder, nowadays anorexia nervosa has become in a very common problem within our society that may affect people from any age, gender, race, or social condition. Anorexia can be classified as an illness that is in a constant evolution, it usually drives the patient towards a worse situation. Anorexia in adolescents can be easily distinguished by observing physicallyattitudes, such as low body weight, a distorted body image, restriction of food (rejection of eating food which contains sugars or fat) and a constant measurement of their weight. Even though the patient is very

skinny, they use to see themselves as overweight and they control their body weight by starving or using laxatives. Their capability to manage their weight and to ignore the hungrysignals from the body became in an obsession. As all addictions, the outcome can be very harmful. We can classify the negative consequences of anorexia by physical and psychologically. The psychological effects generated by the anorexia disorder include anxiety, depression, and an obsessive personality disorder. All these psychological effects can lead the patient to commit suicide. As anorexia ismainly a psychological disorder, all these effects are produced by the patient’s mind. Since our mind controls our body, mood, attitude, and personality the psychological consequences can be more harmful than the physical ones. The most common physical complications that lead the patient to death are cardiac arrest, and electrolyte and fluid imbalances. But there are also many more physicalcomplications that not necessarily leads to an imminent death but that are present in the patient’s whole body, such as cardiovascular and neurological complications, impaired physical development, and amenorrhea, the abnormal absence of menstruation in girls. As the body is not being well nourished, the body sends certain signals to protect itself, such as low blood pressure and thus drop of internal bodytemperature causing a person to feel cold at all of the time and thus a feeling of weakness, anemia, and skinny and brittle hair and nail, dry and yellowish skin, and tooth decay. As the patient is very obsessed by control and losing weight, they are unaware of all these consequences.

CAUSES

Even though, there are no specific causes that direct to the development of the illness inadolescents, recent studies have found similar patterns of behavior in suffers of anorexia. One of them is the intense desire for having an ideal figure. Famous singers, Top Models, and beautiful actress whose body shape appears to be enviable contribute in an indirectly way to the progress of anorexia. It is unbelievable that even still on the 21st century some societies are marked by this standard of...