| One of the serious eating disorders is anorexia. Most people have heard about it, but few realize that it affects quite a large fraction of the American population these days. Statistics show that three to five percent of the population is anorexic. What this means is that these people starve themselves repeatedly to lose weight. Why? They do so because they are convinced that they are overweight and do not look good enough. Most people suffering from this eating disorder are young people in puberty, and anorexia affects twice as many young women as men.
Usually teenagers are affected by the images of good looking slim peers and glamorous skinny models from magazines and TV advertisements. This results in dissatisfaction about one's own look, leading to depression, and then anorexia. These teenagers would try anything to lose weight - from extreme dieting to laxatives.
Teenagers suffering from this disorder have a very weak immune system and are an easy target for many diseases. Their inner organs like the heart and lungs have very slim tissues - the result of staving and a lack of sufficient calories, minerals and vitamins. A low immune system, chronic weakness and depression, usually make the situation even worse for an anorexic person - both physically and emotionally.
They live in a constant fear of becoming fat people, and cut down their daily meals to the amounts dangerous for their health and even life.
Such people have less than fifteen percent less body weight than normal for their age, gender, and height.
This disorder is more spread among celebrities - these are the people who are constantly looked up upon, and any physical imperfections in their look would be noticed by the public. People in "public professions" - dancers, singers, actors - are more likely to become anorexic than people of professions where personal looks matter less.
Food addiction by nature is a product of modern fashion, which dictates us its frameworks, measures and standards of excellent understanding. The tendency of a person towards outer and inner harmony is natural and is caused by his state of mind and sensation of personal comfort. Why then, as if purposely, the more close we "come nearer" to the social "ideal", the more intricate and isolating forms he assumes – exhausted body, splitting hairs, dry skin, sunken eyes, yellow teeth, attacked by gastric acid and eyes, deprived of a live shine...?
The first symptoms of anorexia sickness are: progressing weight loss, panic and fear due to obesity, sleeping disorders, a guilty feeling during starvation and food intake and depression.
As a rule, girls, belonging to the age group of 14 to 19, are prone to the anorexia disease and also aged people, when becoming senile.
In the first case, the unrestrained aspiration to thinness is connected, in young girls, with the formation of their own libido and imposed canons of beauty; the fundamental set occurs in their consciousness about the direct proportional dependence of sexual appeal on body weight and the ability to rationally assess their appearance erases.
In the second case of advanced aged people, who are susceptible to paranoic seizures,
The obsessive idea chases them about to get rid of particularly, poisons.
In the classical variant, anorexia appears in two variations: restrictions and purifications. The "restriction" process is understood as the aspiration of the patient to observe rigid diets, restrictions in food intake with the simultaneous increase in physical activities or the aspiration to completely refuse food. "Purification" is an aspiration of the patient by any means, by every possible procedures (stomach washing, intake of laxative drugs, enema, artificial induced vomits etc.) to get rid of eaten food.
Anorexia treatment is also in 2 stages and is conducted simultaneously both on the psychological and physiological level. In easy cases of anorexia, when the disease is identified during the early stages of development of the illness, treatment can be as an out-patient and in cases of heavy exhaustion, when the deviation of body weight is more than 15% of the standard weight or at a sharp weight loss of more than 40% from the initial weight within a negligible time interval.
During the first stage of treatment, the physical condition of the patient is improved first and foremost. For this purpose, various general health-improving means, vitamins, blood substitutes and complete bed rest are prescribed by the therapist after careful inspection and laboratory analyses and additional tests. Insulin injections, followed by a high-calorie diet with 6 times the food intake are prescribed for the restoration of appetite and for increasing the body weight of the patient. It is considered optimum that the weight increases by 2-4 kg within 4 weeks.
During the second stage of treatment, patients are put on a general regime. Soft tranquilizers and antidepressants are added to the general health-improving therapy. Patient undergoes psycho-correction of valuable orientation with a stress on the explanation of harm due to starvation, elimination of emotional disorders, linked with food intakes, the formation of a correct relationship towards appearance and food behavior as a whole. Hypnosis is effective in isolated cases. Autogenous training sessions are used to eliminate unpleasant sensations in the body.
And at the end of treatment, the patient has a consultation with qualified diet specialists and receives a food regimen in accordance with the structure of their organism.
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Anorexia is a condition when a slim person would try anything to become even slimmer. The opposite would be a fat person who would do nothing to become slimmer. They even have a name for it - Rosie O'Donnel.
