Types of Eating disorders: Anorexia Nervosa

Among the various types of eating disorders, anorexia nervosa is one of the most common and widely spread eating disorder of today. The most common eating disorders are anorexia nervosa, binge eating, bulimia nervosa, and compulsive overeating.

Anorexia nervosa and bulimia are the most familiar and outspreader types of eating disorders

Anorexia Nervosa History

Anorexia nervosa, or anorexia as being a popularly recognized one among types of eating disorders, shares the psychological causes that other similar types of eating disorders causes, such as bulimia, binge eating and so on. Anorexia can be characterized as a psychiatric condition directing to an eating disorder.

When compared to bulimics, the anorexics neither binges nor intentionally purge the food, rather voluntarily starve themselves in order to attain a thin body image. Anorexia nervosa is a self-imposed starvation.

Many times, anorexics will go through the voluntary starvation along with excessive exercising, diet pills and unbalanced diets that may be typical for bulimics also, such as unnecessary use of diet pills, diuretics, laxatives, enemas and so forth.

Cause of Anorexia Nervosa

Theories regarding the anorexia nervosa causes include the psychological, biological, and environmental behaviors. As is the case with bulimia, the causes of anorexia are due to the new society and the way it saturates the image of the perfect body in our brains and this condition have an effect mostly on young people, as they are less vigorous on an emotional level.

In addition, a huge part of the total anorexia sufferers consists of young women than men, it is also estimated that around 0.5 to 3.7 percent of females are suffering from anorexia, who are very much concerned about their body image, proportions and weight.

While these are the main causes that lead to the anorexia, one of the types of eating disorders, the exact psychiatric patterns and consequences of anorexia are still mostly unidentified and continuously evaluated upon.

Effects of Anorexia

The effects of anorexia, one of the types of eating disorders, on the body and mind can be disturbing and harsh. A person suffering from anorexia will have an entirely distorted self-image and the thinking that their body can get even thinner will be major one.

This severely looses the weight, which can lead to a general state of weakness and the voluntary starvation, which hinders the body from obtaining the necessary quantity of vitamins and minerals.

If these two severities are continued for a longer time, then there will be overwhelming effects on the body and the systems of the body, mostly the cardiovascular and digestive systems will be troubled more.

On an emotional level, anorexics will have a low self-esteem and disturbed mood as well as feelings of depression. Opportunely, once the body receives proper and regular nourishment, many of these effects can be inverted.

Anorexia Treatment

A person suffering from anorexia is diagnosed for treatment. The treatment of anorexia, one of the types of eating disorders, will have a specific treatment plan that includes three stages: the first stage is getting the body functions to normal parameters and restoring the weight that is lost due to severe dieting and extreme exercising.

Next stage will be treating psychological instability such as distortion of body image, low self-esteem, and interpersonal variances and the final stage would be getting an enduring remission or full recovery. To achieve this, a few weeks of alert dieting are vital for the treatment to work.

Early diagnosis and treatment increases the successful treatment rate. In addition to these, it is most important for the patients to have regular sessions with a psychiatrist in order to avoid the addiction for low body weight.

In general, this is a very difficult task for the psychiatrist because most anorexics will not accept the fact willingly that they are suffering from a problem.

Lastly, Prozac, an anti-depressant medication can be used in the treatment for anorexia, one of the types of eating disorders, in some rare cases, even though they have proven not to be as resourceful as they are with bulimics.