Do You Have an Eating Disorder? Know the Signs and What you can do About it

You could have an eating disorder if you find it increasingly difficult to focus on other aspects of your life. You could have an eating disorder if you obsess over food and weight issues. If left undiagnosed and untreated, eating disorders can completely take over your life and result in serious, even fatal, medical conditions. Let’s discuss.

What Are Eating Disorders?

Eating disorders are significantly serious conditions associated with persistent eating patterns that have an adverse effect on your emotions, health, and your ability to function daily.

Eating disorders are psychological problems marked by significant and ongoing disturbances in eating patterns and the associated negative thoughts and emotions. These can be extremely severe conditions that influence your social, psychological, and physical functions.

Eating disorders often occur in concurrence with other psychiatric disorders such as mood and anxiety disorders, obsessive-compulsive disorder, alcoholism, and substance use disorders.

The unhealthy obsession with food, weight, and body image that characterizes most eating disorders can have a serious negative effect on your body’s ability to absorb key nutrients. Eating disorders can cause various ailments, affecting your heart, gastrointestinal tract, bones, teeth, and mouth.

Even though they can occur at any age, eating disorders usually start in the teen and young adult phases. The good news is that you can revert to healthier eating patterns and even reverse the major complications of an eating disorder with timely and effective treatment.

What Are The Types Of Eating Disorders?

There are many types of eating disorders but the most common eating disorders are binge-eating disorder, bulimia nervosa, and anorexia nervosa.

Anorexia Nervosa

Anorexia nervosa is characterized by an unusually low body weight caused by a strong fear of gaining weight and a skewed sense of body image. Anorexics go to extreme lengths to maintain their abnormally low body weight and shape, which adversely affects their health. An adult with anorexia nervosa typically has a body mass index (BMI) ≤ 18.5 (a measure of weight for height).

The intense fear of gaining weight or getting fat drives the anorexics’ behavior. Anorexics deny hunger by severely restricting their calorie intake, indulging in excessive exercise, misusing laxatives or other diet aids, and throwing up right after eating.

Anorexia takes a heavy physical and emotional toll on a person. Some typical symptoms are:

• Weight loss
• Dehydration
• Dizziness
• Brittle hair and nails
• Constipation
• Bloating
• Stomach pain
• Heartburn and reflux
• Irregularities or loss of menstruation
• Irregular heart rhythms
• Low blood pressure
• Low tolerance to cold
• Muscle pain and weakness
• Stress fractures from excessive exercise
• Bone loss leading to osteopenia or osteoporosis
• Irritability
• Anxiety and depression
• Poor focus
• Tiredness and fatigue
• Isolation
• General low mood
• Insomnia

This extreme form of self-starvation can have deadly health consequences. Other than opioid use disorder, anorexia has the highest mortality of any psychiatric diagnosis.

Bulimia nervosa

People with bulimia nervosa alternate binge eating the “forbidden” high-calorie foods with dieting or restricting their diet to just the low-calorie “safe foods.”

Binge eating is characterized by consuming large quantities of food rapidly and feeling as though they have no control over what or how much they are eating. They binge eat beyond the point of fullness, leading to a negative state of discomfort, nausea, guilt, and shame. Similar to anorexia nervosa, those who suffer from bulimia nervosa are highly obsessed with their body weight and image. This results in overcompensatory behaviors such as fasting, throwing up, misuse of laxatives, or excessive exercise.

It soon develops into a vicious repetitive cycle that adversely affects all aspects of a person’s life, including their emotional and physical health. Bulimics are often normal weight or even slightly overweight.

You may not notice a person with bulimia nervosa as their behaviors are hidden, sometimes even to those close to them. Some common signs that someone has bulimia nervosa are:

• Regular trips to the bathroom, especially after meals
• Recurrent unexplained diarrhea
• Mysterious disappearance of large amounts of food
• Chronic sore throat
• Swelling of the salivary glands in the cheeks
• Heartburn and acid reflux
• Dental decay because of erosion of tooth enamel by stomach acid
• Misuse of diuretics
• Dizziness
• Dehydration
• Low self-esteem

If untreated, bulimia can lead to rare but potentially fatal conditions such as cardiac arrhythmias, heart failure, esophageal tears, gastric rupture, and even death.

Binge Eating Disorder (BED)

In binge-eating disorder, you are frequently overcome by a loss of control, leading to overeating even when you’re not hungry. or binging. You may eat rapidly or consume more food than you wanted to, and continue to keep eating even after you’re feeling full and uncomfortable.

They feel embarrassment, depression, contempt, and remorse because of their actions. However, unlike those with bulimia nervosa, they don’t frequently resort to compensatory behaviors like fasting, exercising, or abusing laxatives to get rid of the food.

Binge eaters might eat alone for the fear of being judged. Binge eaters can be of normal weight, overweight or obese.

For diagnosis, they need to exhibit binge eating tendencies at least once in a week for at least three months. Some typical signs of identifying binge eaters are:

• Consume food rapidly
• Eating even after feeling uncomfortably full
• Eating when not hungry
• Eating in isolation to avoid public embarrassment and judgment
• Feelings of shame, guilt, contempt, and remorse after the binge.

Obesity, diabetes, hypertension, and cardiovascular conditions can all develop because of binge eating disorders.

Why You Should See A Doctor For Your Eating Disorder

Often, people with eating disorders think they don’t require medical treatment at all. But, it’s difficult to overcome eating disorders on your own because they are complex conditions of dietary, behavioral, psychological, or other medical issues.

A person with an eating disorder has the best chance of recovery if they get an early diagnosis. So, call your doctor immediately if you think you have an eating disorder.

Your primary care doctor in Los Gatos would typically perform a physical examination while a psychologist will perform a psychological assessment to aid in the diagnosis and used to look for any problems or linked medical conditions. To support a diagnosis, the symptoms must meet the Diagnostic and Statistical Manual of Mental Disorders (DSM) criteria. This holistic approach offers the person with eating disorders an all-encompassing treatment and therapy support, which aids in ensuring a long-lasting recovery.

With prompt and proper medical care, people with eating disorders can resume healthy eating habits and recover their physical and emotional health.