Anorexia Tips
Some Helpful Anorexia Tips
It would be nice to be able to provide a list of anorexia tips guaranteed to put a person suffering from the disease well on the road to recovery. Unfortunately, it's not that simple. In anorexia, we're dealing with a disease which can be the result of any number of causes, many of them psychological. Treatment therefore must more often than not be left in the hands of professionals.
That is not to say that here are no anorexia tips you could take advantage of, to get someone started on a path of treatment and recovery. It's simply a matter of finding a workable approach. About 90% of anorexic people are women, and a large percentage of those are adolescent women. They are often concerned about their appearance, and invariably have a fear of being overweight or fat. This fear goes well beyond shedding five pounds or so. No matter how much weight the anorexic person has lost, they are convinced they are still overweight, and need to loose more.
One thing you can do though, for a friend or family member, is to try to prevent an anorexic situation from starting in the first place, by convincing the person that you think of them as being attractive, and there is no need for them to worry about their weight. This of course can be difficult to do if the person is grossly overweight, but when someone is at a reasonable weight, is shouldn't be hard to try to convince then that they look fine. Part of the problem lies with the media, where celebrities all seem to be slim and beautiful, and when they do gain a few pounds much is made of their efforts to become slim and beautiful again.
Remind the teenager, or preteen, that the beautiful starlets are the exception, rather than the rule, and often live lives that are less than ideal in trying to stay attractive. You might even show some testimonials, given by celebrities, who have been afflicted with anorexia, and have told what it was like to live with, and how difficult a cure could be.
You can even cite some statistics, of which there are many, indicating that anorexia can be a terminal disease, lead to other diseases which could eventually prove fatal, or simply be a chronic condition that will lead to a low quality lifestyle. Using scare tactics can of course backfire, but can also be effective. You have to know the person you're talking to, to see which approach will work.
If you do see a problem developing, try very hard to get the person involved to see a professional. Sometimes people will believe the professional when they would not believe a friend, or a family member. Still, intervention of one kind or another may be the best way to getting the person on the right track. This will likely become more and more difficult as the disease progresses, as the anorexic may very likely enter a state of denial. Either denial, or being convinced that they still are overweight, and must continue to lose more, are powerful factors that are hard to deal with.
The best tip of all may be to do what ever you can to let the person know that you love them, and/or care for them, and that they would be doing themselves a big favor, and you a big favor, if they visited with a professional, who could lay the facts in front of them, without having to rely on emotion to get them to change their ways.