What is Eating Disorder?

Eating disorders are defined as a chronic disruption of eating or eating-related behaviour that results in changed food consumption or absorption and severely impacts your health, emotions, and capacity to function in essential areas of life. Most eating disorders entail obsessing about your weight, body form, and food, which leads to harmful eating habits. These behaviors can have a major influence on your body's capacity to obtain adequate nourishment. Eating disorders may cause problems on the heart, digestive system, bones, teeth, and mouth, as well as contribute to other ailments. They are complicated mental health disorders that frequently need the involvement of medical and psychological professionals to change their course. They can be life-threatening illnesses that impair physical, psychological, and social function.

Although eating disorders can affect people of any gender and at any age, they are more often documented among teenagers and young women. In fact, up to 13% of young people will have at least one eating disorder by the age of 20. With therapy, you can regain control of your eating habits and, in some cases, reverse significant problems caused by the eating disorder.

Although no one understands what causes eating disorders, they appear to coexist with psychological and physical problems such as poor self-esteem, depression, anxiety, difficulty coping with emotions, and drug misuse. For other people, obsessing over eating becomes a means of gaining control over one component of their lives. Although it may begin as merely eating a little more or less than normal, the behaviour may regurgitated out of hand and take over an individual's health. Eating disorders are a severe medical condition that, if left untreated, can have long-term health repercussions.

There is a widespread misconception that eating disorders are a choice. Eating disorders are serious and often fatal illnesses characterized by severe disruptions in people's eating behaviors, as well as related thoughts and emotions. An eating disorder may also be indicated by a preoccupation with food, body weight, or shape. Anorexia nervosa, bulimia nervosa, binge eating disorder, avoidant restrictive food intake disorder, other specified feeding and eating disorder, pica, and rumination disorder are types of eating disorders.

• ANOREXIA NERVOSA: Self-starvation and weight loss define anorexia nervosa, resulting in a low weight for height and age. Even though they are dangerously underweight, people suffering from anorexia nervosa may believe they are overweight. Anorexia nervosa patients frequently weigh themselves, severely restrict their food intake, frequently exercise excessively, and/or force themselves to vomit or use laxatives to lose weight.
• BULIMIA NERVOSA: Bulimia nervosa patients generally cycle between dieting, or eating only low-calorie food, and binge eating "strictly prohibited" high-calorie foods. Bulimia nervosa is characterized by recurring and frequent periods of eating abnormally large amounts of food and having a sense powerlessness over controlling these episodes.
• BINGE EATING DISORDER (BED): BED patients lose control of their eating and consume a large amount of food in a short period of time. People who suffer from binge eating disorder continue to eat even when they are full. They are ashamed, disgusted, depressed, or guilty as a result of their actions.
• AVOIDANT/ RESTRICTIVE FOOD INTAKE DISORDER: Avoidant/ restrictive food intake disorder is an eating or feeding condition indicated by chronic inability to fulfil acceptable nutritional and/or energy needs (e.g., seeming lack of interest in eating or food; avoidance based on food sensory characteristics; worry over eating's negative repercussions). It usually starts in infancy or early childhood, although it can last until adulthood. Furthermore, it affects both men and women equally.
• OTHER SPECIFIED FEEDING AND EATING DISORDER: It is used when an individual exhibits eating disorder symptoms but does not meet the criteria for clinical diagnosis. For instance, all the diagnostic meets for anorexia nervosa, except for severe weight loss, the individual's weight is within or above the normal range.
• PICA: Pica is consistent use of nonnutritive, nonfood substances for at least one month. Pica patients have a strong desire for non-food items including ice, mud, soil, chalk, soap, paper, hair, fabric, wool, pebbles, laundry detergent, or cornstarch, etc.
• Rumination disorder: Repeated regurgitation of food over a period of at least 1 month. Food that has been regurgitated might be chewed again, swallowed again, or spat out. There is no link between the regurgitation and a gastrointestinal or other medical issue (e.g., gastro esophageal reflux, pyloric stenosis).

Thus, a variety of treatments are used to treat eating problems. Treatment options will vary based on the condition, however they will usually involve psychotherapy, Nutritional counseling and weight restoration monitoring.