If you click on any link on this page,then you agree with our disclaimer.

Olsen twins, Calista Flockhart, Karen Carpenter, Kate Moss - except for all of them being famous women in their own rights, what do they have in common? Anorexia nervosa. These women all had and have, or at one time in their lives contracted this so-called "Star's disease".

Anorexia nervosa, sometimes also referred as "slimmer's disease", is considered an eating disorder that is usually the cause of malnutrition. It is a condition wherein an afflicted person continues to do dieting even after already reaching the appropriate weight for his stature. It starts with the initial objective of losing weight. When the person has already mastered the weight loss scheme, eventually, he will take it as a sign of being able to control his body. This becomes an obsession to the extent of starving himself just to lose more weight. Tantamount to some kind of drug addiction, anorexia will become an unquenchable thirst for losing weight.

No clear-cut factor has been determined as a definite cause of anorexia. But many ongoing researches are trying to unveil what pushes anorectics to become one. Some medical and psychological experts pinpoint societal demands as one of the possible major cause of anorexia.

Females at the onset of their puberty, being hard-pressed with the "attractively skinny" fad strewn by the media, are predominantly prone to this disease. All those magazine cover and TV advertisements telling that stick thin girls are a lot better than their chubbier sisters, what could be more emotionally taxing, right?

Another ground that specialists would relate to anorexia is a certain dysfunction discovered from the family of the anorexic patient. This dysfunction deals with the members of a family who are tremendously inter-reliant with each other. This extreme interdependence stunts the ability of the members to achieve their individual identities. This dysfunction is commonly observed among young girls. Their preference to maintain their dependence is often in the form of maintaining the parent-child relationship. In order to preserve this relationship, they resort to starving themselves. In their line of thinking, starvation would stop the physical development they are supposed to undergo. Since physical changes are inevitable, especially among adolescents, these young girls are particularly prone to anorexia.

Aside from the apparent excessive thinness or sudden weight loss, the
following may lead to discovering if one suffers from anorexia:

- A person that often eats secretly or who constantly refuses to eat in public
- A person who has eating rituals, i.e., cuts his food in extremely small pieces, eats too slowly, holds cutlery in weird ways, tightly holds utensils
- A person who faints often
- A person who has no menstruation
- A person who pays too much attention to food but does not eat it
- A person who often say that he's fat but he's actually not
- A person who has dry skin or thinning hair
- A person who has grown lanugo or thin hair that grows on the body in response to excessive starvation to keep the body warm when a person lacks enough fat

But a person could still be found out with anorexia even without all those signs mentioned. A person suffering from anorexia is usually unaware of his condition. Aside from the delusional effect of extreme starvation, they are blinded by their severe desire to lose weight. Anorectics frequently show symptoms like weakness, infertility, dryness of skin, cessation of menstruation and low body temperature. But the most fatal effect of anorexia is loss of heart muscle.

10% of anorexic people may die if left untreated. This disease is not much of the body's but of the mind's. This means that anyone who develops anorexia must be given psychological help immediately.

Index

Click here to read latest news

Click here to read our blog

Click here to visit our links directory

Disclaimers Terms of Use Privacy Policy