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| Regardless of how it started, the person fighting the demon anorexia inside feels unworthy of food and life. Although this illness sounds as if it were a problem of appetite and food and weight, it isn't. It is an illness of self-respect, of how one rates oneself in relation to others, and someone with anorexia honestly believes that they are horrible failures who do not deserve anything but pain. They feel like constant failures who can never do anything right. Deep down every person with anorexia feels and is convinced that they are inadequate, low, mediocre, inferior, and despised by others. All their efforts, their striving for perfection through excessive thinness, are directed toward hiding the flaw of being unworthy/imperfect. Although someone with anorexia often just says their problems are because they are "fat," realize that "fat" means the same thing as "not good enough," and that is why someone fighting this monster fears "fat." They fear that they are not good enough as they think they should be. This is what a doctor uses to help make a clinical diagnosis about a person suffuring from bulimia 1. Refusal to maintain body weight at or above a minimally normal weight for age and height (e.g., weight loss leading to maintenance of body weight less than 85% of that expected; or failure to make expected weight gain during period of growth, leading to body weight less than 85% of that expected). 2. Intense fear of gaining weight or becoming fat, even though underweight. 3. Disturbance in the way in which one's body weight or shape is experienced, undue influence of body weight or shape on self-evaluation, or denial of the seriousness of the current low body weight. 4. In postmenarcheal females (women who have not yet gone through menopause), amenorrhea (the absence of at least three consecutive menstrual cycles). ~ Restricting Type: during the current episode of Anorexia Nervosa, the person has not regularly engaged in binge-eating or purging behavior (i.e., self-induced vomiting or the misuse of laxatives, diuretics, or enemas) ~ Binge-Eating Type or Purging Type: during the current episode of Anorexia Nervosa, the person has regularly engaged in binge-eating OR purging behavior (i.e., self-induced vomiting or the misuse of laxatives, diuretics, or enemas) |