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Types of Eating Disorders 1

An eating disorder can generally be described as a condition where an individual's nutrition is not handled properly, which can lead to severe damage to his or her body. The elements that cause these disorders, the way they affect the body and how the sufferer handles these aspects can be different with each type of eating disorder and they mainly split up into 5 categories: bulimia, anorexia, binge eating, compulsive overeating and pica. Let's take a look at each of these eating disorder types and see what differentiates them, how they are diagnosed and treated and what their effects are.

Bulimia Nervosa

Overview

Bulimia is most often considered the next step after binge eating, which in turn can be caused by compulsive overeating. This makes bulimia a sort of ending branch in the eating disorder tree and it's by far the most dangerous of all of them. Basically, bulimia consists in constant feats of overeating, followed by intentional and voluntary purging through methods such as vomiting, excessive use of laxatives, enemas and so forth.

Causes

The causes for bulimia are in 95% of the cases of emotional, psychological and social nature. We are constantly being bombarded with a preset image on how our body should look like, which sets a pattern in our minds that we must achieve that image for ourselves in order to be attractive. The inability to achieve this goal (due to our natural constitution, fat levels, our imposed daily diets - especially for youngsters that cannot have a choice in diet) leads to depression and to severe actions such as the intentional purging methods mentioned above.

Effects

The effects of bulimia are damaging for both our mind and body. First off, sufferers of bulimia often feel guilty and depressed for having to resort to intentional purging, which only aggravates the unstable emotional platform they are on. This leads to a vicious circle where the patient knows that what he does is wrong, yet he cannot stop doing it because of other, stronger motives and so on.

At body level, bulimia has extremely damaging effects on the digestive and cardiovascular systems. The esophagus and stomach will often be flooded with acid when intentional purging is performed, which can lead to severe problems in a short period of time. By eliminating most of the food that they intake, sufferers of bulimia don't receive their required amounts of vitamins and minerals, hence their body is weakened with each purging. This can lead to ulcers, muscle atrophy, blood flow problems, immune system weaknesses, hormonal imbalances and so forth.

Treatment

Since bulimia is an emotionally-driven eating disorder, the sooner it is discovered the faster and more efficient the treatment will be. Actually, treating the disease is not that hard, especially if the treatment is done in a specialized care center. Treatment usually has two parts, one where the depression is treated through counseling and the other where it is treated through anti-depressant medications, such as Prozac. However, the hard part is getting a person to willingly undertake such a treatment and allow himself to be diagnosed with bulimia in the first place.