Essay Ana And Mia

A life with Ana and Mia

An eating disorder is a group of conditions defined by abnormal eating habits. It is an obsession with food and weight. Although all the people worry about their weight, the people who have an eating disorder go to extremes and harm their selves to stop from gaining weight, or can’t stop their selves from eating.

There are many eating disorders, but we are going totalk about two of the most known and mentioned ones: Anorexia and Bulimia.

Anorexia alters an individual's idea about their look and therefore when looking at the mirror they see a distorted image of what in reality is, which affects them mentally and leads to an obsessive fear from gaining weight.

Persons with this problem continue feeling hungry, but they deny it and trick their body withvery small quantities of food.

Most of the time, anorexia occurs in adolescence and more often in women than in men.

Some of the health illnesses that the people who have anorexia could experience are dizziness, heart problems, low blood pressure, low body temperature, fainting, brittleness of hair and nails, and the loss of scalp hair. Other symptoms are dry skin, dehydration andconstipation. The feeling of depression, tiredness and cold are also causes of anorexia. This eating disorder causes lanugo too, which is the growth of a very fine and abundant layer of facial hair, back and arms. It can cause menstrual periods to stop because there is not enough estrogen to maintain a normal body function, and when you do not have enough estrogen it can develop osteoporosis, and thecombination of this illness and the excessive amount exercise that these people do, can lead to stress fractures.

Since this condition does not appear from the overnight and some attitudes that seem to be very healthy you cannot realize, too quickly, that the person has a problem.

They begin to eliminate foods like fried fattened, soft drinks, desserts, candies, and start to drink more water and anexcessive interest in knowing the nutritional value and energy of everything they eat or drink. They also begin with a strict program of physical activity.

As the time goes on, they begin to remove products such as eggs, meat, poultry, fish, and decide to become vegetarian. Then stop eating with family or friends and start hiding or rid food.

After deciding to leave the whole cheese oryogurt, for low-fat, they continue until their diet consists only of water, grains, lettuce, tomato, jicama, cucumber, carrot and grapefruit, along with 4 or 5 hours of rigorous exercise a day, and they become collectors of low-calorie recipes for their own use and to loan to friends.

On the other hand we have Bulimia.

Bulimia is also is an eating disorder characterized by binge eating, which isconsuming an exaggerated amount of food in a short period of time, followed by an attempt to rid the calories consumed by purging, puking, and doing excessive exercise.

These binge cycles involve rapid and out-of-control eating, which may stop when the bulimic is interrupted by another person, their stomach hurts from overextension, or when they feel regret, followed by self-induced vomitingor different ways of purging. This cycle may be repeated several times a week or a day and by doing this it can cause several health problems.

Bulimia is nine times more likely to occur in women than men (Barker 2003).

The binge may cause directly electrolytic serious problems, irregular menstrual periods, dehydration, swollen face, sore throat, tooth decay, dry, flaky skin; constant upsetstomach, heartburn, and constipation, depression and weight fluctuations.

Low potassium levels, resulting from the loss of large amounts of potassium in the vomit, they can take to have serious cardiac arrhythmias and even death.

Bulimia is even more difficult to detect just by looking at the person, since health problems are not as obvious as in anorexia. For example, someone may have a...