Eating disorders are complex and individualized, with each person experiencing unique symptoms. However, there are common patterns that allow us to categorize these disorders.
In essence, eating disorders involve an unhealthy preoccupation with eating habits, exercise, and body weight or shape. These disorders often manifest in various forms, either simultaneously or alternately, and significantly disrupt daily life.
Statistics on Eating Disorders
- Approximately 70 million people worldwide are affected by eating disorders.
- Over 20 million people in Europe suffer from eating disorders.
- In the US, 20 million women and 10 million men will experience an eating disorder at some point in their lives.
- The number of 8 to 10-year-old children with eating disorders is rising globally.
- China, Japan, and South Korea have some of the highest rates of eating disorders in Asia.
- In Canada, 12% to 30% of young girls and 9% to 25% of young boys show early signs of eating disorders.
- 70% of those struggling with eating disorders do not seek help due to stigma.
Key Characteristics of Eating Disorders (All listed bellow)
All eating disorders share an unreasonable obsession with food and body image, often accompanied by body dysmorphia. This is a misperception of one’s own body, leading to shame and suffering. People with eating disorders believe they have defects in their appearance that make them feel ugly or deformed. This need for control over food and body sensations often results in self-harming behaviors and social isolation.
The Stigma Around Eating Disorders
Many misconceptions about eating disorders persist in society, perpetuated by family, friends, and even colleagues. These stigmas can make it harder to understand eating disorders and increase the risk of negative consequences, such as shame, reluctance to seek help, and even suicide.
Eating disorders can affect anyone, not just women. While the ratio is approximately one man for every ten women, men can also suffer from disorders like anorexia and bulimia, as well as an obsession with gaining muscle mass due to societal pressures.
Contrary to popular belief, being skinny does not equate to being healthy, nor does not being skinny mean one is unhealthy. Health involves a balanced diet, sleep, and stress management, with weight being only a small part of the equation.
Misconceptions and Realities
It’s crucial to recognize that people with eating disorders may not always appear thin. This does not mean they are suffering less. Similarly, being thin does not automatically indicate an eating disorder. Many individuals with eating disorders do not exhibit significant weight changes, as the body can adapt to prevent weight loss. However, this does not reduce the health risks or the need for help.
Eating disorders are not confined to developed countries; they exist everywhere. They are not lifestyle choices, mere diets, or cries for attention—they are serious illnesses that often require professional help for recovery.
ANOREXIA
The World Health Organization (WHO) defines anorexia nervosa as “a disorder characterized by deliberate weight loss, induced and sustained by the patient”.
People with anorexia nervosa can have an excessively low body weight, they have an intense fear of gaining weight and suffer from body dysmorphia. Very often this comes from an identity problem linked to low self-esteem inducing a poor perception of their body image and a vulnerability to life and its changes.
People going through this experience will use all the means at their disposal to reach their goal, as for example rationing their diet, doing sport in an excessive way or going through fasting. This fight against hunger gives the person a feeling of control and of power over this body they dislike so much, and, in a way, it gives them the impression to have a sense of control on their life.
People with anorexia can present or not a compensatory method like vomiting, taking a laxative, diuretic or natural health product and/or excessive physical exercise.
Although people with bulimia also presents an obsession with thinness, it is characterized by the disorganization of the rhythm of eating. People with bulimia alternate between periods of uncontrollable overeating where they intake huge amounts of food that they usually consider as forbidden (binge eating) and compensatory behaviors aimed at controlling weight.
These moments when the person overrates are usually triggered either by interpersonal tension, a feeling of intense hunger following a period of restriction, or thoughts of appearance and weight.
This behavior is usually unconsciously used to provide a temporary relief from internal discomfort, a feeling of refuge or comfort. However, after eating this forbidden food or from eating too much, a strong feeling of guilt or shame, as well as depressive feelings may appear. In order to deal with these feelings, the person will feel the urge to get the control back and will use a compensatory method such as: vomiting, taking a laxative, diuretic or natural health product, restricting their diet or to induce excessive physical exercise.
BOULIMIA
BINGE EATING DISORDER (BED)
In a similar way to bulimic patients, people with Binge Eating Disorder (BED) struggle with overeating. However, people suffering from BED differ from those experiencing bulimia by the lack of weight control using compensatory methods after eating food.
Overeating « crises » are characterized by taking an amount of food, in a limited period of time (less than about 2 hours), which exceeds the amount of food that another individual could eat in the same time and the same circumstances. Although we note the presence of shame and disgust as well as a great guilt related to the adopted behavior, people with BED do not resort to vomiting or to the use of laxatives to compensate for their bingeing. Most of the time, binge eating is the result of the abuse of dieting. Unlike people with bulimia, those with BED are usually obese where food is used to regulate one’s emotions and it can be reinforced in times of personal difficulties.
Orthorexia indicates an unhealthy obsession with the choice of food ingested. This mean that the person can refuse to eat other foods they are not “good for the health” or to plan his diet at length in order to reduce the fats, salt, sugar, chemicals or other substances that it considers harmful to health. The aim of this behavior is to “choose” foods according to their quality or composition, thus allowing the person to be certain that they are “eating well” or “eating healthy”. The dietary rules imposed becomes more and more restrictive for the person and this induce social isolation and a loss of pleasure related to food.
ORTHOREXIA
AVOIDANT RESTRICTIVE FOOD INTAKE (ARFID)
The term ARFID (i.e. Avoidant/Restrictive Food Intake Disorder) refers to people that either avoid eating certain food or restrict their food intake. In contrast to people with anorexia nervosa or bulimia, ARFID patients are not obsessed with their figure and physical exercise. Hence, they do not avoid/restrict certain food for fear of gaining weight, but for other psychological reasons (e.g. past trauma, taste preference and/or color preference).
ARFID and ‘picky eating habits’ are not the same thing. People going through this experience will feel distress if they have to eat the kind food they avoid where for someone who is picky this won’t lead to stress and distress. This eating disorder is mostly observed in children as early as 2 years old to young adolescent. Children with ARFID often struggle with nutritional deficiencies caused by the avoidance/restriction of certain food groups. People with ARFID are often younger than people with other eating disorders (11 years vs 14 years).
Recent studies demonstrated that young ARFID patients do not suffer from body dysmorphia, but struggle with anxiety disorders more than other patients with an eating disorder do. Unlike most eating disorder, young boys are more likely to struggle with ARFID than young girls, however adult women struggle more with ARFID than adult men do.
Bigorexia, also known as muscle dysmorphia, is a condition where a person becomes obsessed with the idea that their body is too small or insufficiently muscular, despite often having well-developed muscles. People with bigorexia may spend excessive time working out, follow strict diets, use supplements or steroids, and constantly check their appearance in mirrors. This obsession can lead to significant distress, social isolation, and physical harm. If you feel you’re never muscular enough, even when others say you are, and it’s affecting your life, you might be experiencing bigorexia.
BIGOREXIA
PICA
People suffering from pica will ingest quite everything even non-food items such as dirt, sand and clay, over a long period of time. The ingestion of such no-nutrient dense items can lead to poisoning, brain damage, bacterial infections and intestinal inflammations.
People suffering from diabulimia (ED-DMT1) are diabetics (Diabetes Mellitus Type 1), deliberately refusing to take their insulin. Alike people with anorexia nervosa and bulimia, they are obsessed with weight loss. By manipulating the level of insulin in the blood, people with diabulimia try to prevent weight gain. In the same way as bulimia and other eating disorders, diabulimia poses serious risk to human health (e.g. menstrual disruption, gastroparesis and liver disease).
DIABOULIMA (ED-DMT1)
