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Anorexia
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Anorexia is an eating disorder where people starve themselves. Anorexia usually begins in young people around the onset of puberty. Individuals suffering from anorexia have extreme weight loss. Weight loss is usually 15% below the person's normal body weight. People suffering from anorexia are very skinny but are convinced that they are overweight. Weight loss is obtained by many ways.
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Anorexia is an effective way to cope with difficult circumstances because it serves to distract the sufferer from the pain. Losing weight provides a concrete goal that requires energy, planning, and effort. The amount of time spent tallying calories, exercising, and thinking about food is time spent not thinking about pain. Also, many anorexics experience a "high" when they are at a low weight because only there do they feel a sense of power and success. In addition to food restriction, bingeing can both numb and bring comfort. Medical theory suggests that the consumption of carbohydrates boosts serotonin levels in the brain, which in turn alleviates feelings of depression.
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Anorexia can have a big effect on your body and mind. If you have anorexia, you are afraid of getting fat, so you avoid eating. The result is weight loss. At first, the drop in weight may not be noticeable or look unhealthy. But in a short time, the weight loss becomes dramatic and threatens your health.
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Anorexia typically has numerous complications. At its most severe, it can be fatal. Anorexia has one of the higher deaths rates among all mental illnesses, hovering around 5 percent but perhaps even higher than that. Death may occur suddenly — even when someone is not severely underweight. This may result from abnormal heart rhythms (arrhythmias) or electrolyte imbalances. In fact, it was the anorexia-related death of singer Karen Carpenter in 1983 that catapulted the disease into the public arena.
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Anorexia affects both the body and the mind. It may start as dieting, but it gets out of control. You think about food, dieting, and weight all the time. You have a distorted body image. Other people say you are too thin, but when you look in the mirror, you see a fat person.
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Anorexia, like other eating disorders, can take over the lives of people with this illness. They may think about food all of the time, spend hours agonizing over options in the grocery store and exercise to exhaustion. They ... may have a host of physical problems that make them feel generally miserable, such as being cold all the time or experiencing dizziness, constipation and fatigue. They may be irritable, angry, moody, sad, anxious and hopeless. They may visit pro-anorexia Web sites, refer to the disease as their "friend," cover up in layers of heavy clothing, and try to subsist on a menu of lettuce, carrots, popcorn and diet soda.
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