Anorexia Information

One of the common eating disorders prevalent in the society today, anorexia nervosa is a condition in which a person has intense fear of putting on weight. Some of the other prominent characteristics of the disease include extreme low body weight and body image distortion. A psychiatric illness, anorexia makes a person limit his/her food intake and long to become severely thin. Such people voluntarily starve themselves, which, at times, also leads to death. Anorexia is mostly seen in adolescent females, but males cannot be ruled out of the illness completely. In the following lines, we have provided some of the major causes and symptoms of anorexia nervosa.

Causes Of Anorexia

  • Low self-esteem
  • Biochemical factors
  • Psychiatric disorders
  • Social pressures
  • Genetic predisposition
  • Cultural pressures
  • Psychological issues
  • Family environment
  • Life transitions
  • Perpetuating factors
  • Stress and strain
  • Emotional disturbances
  • Chemical imbalance in the brain
Symptoms Of Anorexia
  • Refusal to eat
  • Insomnia
  • Distortion of body image
  • Excessive importance placed on body composition or shape
  • Denial of seriousness of low weight
  • Intense fear of gaining weight or becoming fat, even if the person is considered underweight
  • Confused thinking
  • Ritualistic eating (including cutting food into a planned number of bites)
  • Spitting out food before swallowing
  • Paying great attention to nutrition labels
  • Major increase in exercise output, even when exhausted
  • Hatred of foods that used to be favorites
  • Increased or unnecessary use of laxatives
  • Vomiting after eating (for the binge eating/purging subtype of anorexia)
  • Weight loss
  • Amenorrhea or interruption of the menstrual cycle
  • Bone loss (osteoporosis or osteopenia)
  • Extra sensitivity to cold
  • Bloated stomach after eating (since the stomach loses its ability to deal with a normal quantity of food at one sitting)
  • Yellowed and dry skin
  • Thinning hair
  • Irregular heart rhythms

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