Anorexia Facts
A Few Anorexia Facts Worth Knowing
One difficulty in compiling a list of anorexia facts is that the disease is rather complicated, in that both its causes and results can be numerous, and differ from person to person. Just what kind of a disease is anorexia? Does it strike women only? Is it contagious? Is binge eating involved? Is it treatable and curable?
Here then are a few anorexia facts, designed to ease some fears, and to give you a better idea as to what this disease is about, and what it is not about. First of all, anorexia is a disease in somewhat the same sense that alcoholism is considered, by many in the medical field, to be a disease. Anorexia is not caused by a virus or a bacteria, and it is not contagious. It is brought about by a state of mind more than by anything else. It's not that the anorexic person was mentally sick to begin with. Quite the opposite is generally true. Anorexia is largely based on fear, the fear of being overweight, and of being fat.
Persons with anorexia are starving themselves, literally starving themselves to death in extreme instances. Anorexia is an eating disorder. The fear of being overweight becomes a fear of eating, or certainly eating enough to provide sufficient nutrition to the body. Not eating enough is not the only cause of anorexia, though the most common. Excessive exercise can sometimes have the same effect, as can excessive use of medications or laxatives, with weight loss in mind. What starts out as simple dieting becomes a psychological disorder, wherein when weight loss has successfully been accomplished, there is a strong drive to continue, with the person involved never convinced that they have lost enough weight, and losing more is better.
The majority of those afflicted with anorexia are women, but men can suffer from it as well. The reason for this is a strong desire on the part of women, especially adolescent women, to be attractive, which to many means being slim. Therefore many women, young women especially, take to dieting to loose weight. It is when the dieting gets out of control, and healthy dieting is replaced by a low nutrition diet, or eating little at all, in hopes of losing still more weight, that the trouble begins and anorexia sets in. Men on the other hand generally want to get bigger, not smaller, and seldom take part in extreme weight loss activities, though it can and does happen. But anorexia is not a function of gender.
Binge eating is neither a cause nor a symptom of anorexia, a source of some confusion. The eating disorder in which an individual eats a normal amount of food, or even an abnormally large amount of food, at one sitting, and then intentionally vomits it back up, is called bulimia, which is different than anorexia. A person with anorexia would not eat a large amount of food, in fact would probably prefer not to have to eat any.
The final anorexia facts are somewhat encouraging in that the disease is both treatable and curable. Sadly however, the recovery rate is not 100%. Statistically, it is somewhere between 60% and 80%, with many suffering from chronic anorexia throughout their lives. The biggest challenge in treating the disease is often the situation in which the patient is in denial, or truly believes they are still overweight, even though they may be in a state of near starvation. Recovery is quite possible, although if an extreme state of starvation has been reached, the body's organs will have begun to deteriorate, and recovery may be a very long process. The body in the meantime will be in a weakened state and vulnerable to other diseases. There is also always the possibility of relapse on the part of the patient, and gaining support from family, friends, and medical personnel is very important towards achieving total recovery.