Anorexia

This article was written in collaboration with Jenup, a non-profit organisation specialising in the early intervention and prevention of eating disorders and body image issues within young people.

What is anorexia?

Anorexia is a compulsive mental illness where the sufferer becomes obsessed with losing weight or staying thin. They do this in a number of ways including skipping meals, cutting out certain foods, excessively exercising or sometimes binge-eating and then throwing up. Often they have a distorted view of their body and think they’re heavier than they are.

Why do you get anorexia?

Although anorexia is called an ‘eating disorder’ it’s actually a mental health condition, often troubling people with low self-esteem who find it hard to deal with anxiety and stress. More often than not, people with anorexia have other issues in their lives making them unhappy and use food as a way of feeling more in control.

“It usually starts with just restricting your diet,” says psychotherapist Andrea Scherzer. “Like cutting out carbs, for example. You start losing weight; get a buzz from that, and so start cutting out more food.”

This thinking can then become more and more obsessional until the eating disorder can start to dominate certain parts of your life.

What are the symptoms of anorexia?

Anorexia has physical, psychological and behavioural symptoms.

Behavioural symptoms:

• Lying about eating
• Cooking food for everyone else
• Obsessively exercising
• Obsessively doing certain things in a certain way (‘ritualistic behaviour’)
• Trying to make everyone happy

Physical symptoms:

• Severe weight loss
• Frequently feeling cold
• Hair falling out or fine hair growing all over your body
• Constipation and stomach pains
• Periods stopping
• Teeth damage
• Loss of bone density
• Dizziness and problems sleeping
• Slowed heart rate
• Low blood pressure
• Liver function issues
• Infertility
• Weakened immune system
• Increased risk of heart failure due to muscle loss

Psychological symptoms:

• Lots of sufferers describe anorexia as having a voice in their head, constantly telling them they’re fat and worthless
• Constantly thinking about food and calories
• Believing that you’ll be ‘happy’ once you reach a certain weight
• Anxiety
• Depression
• Social withdrawal and isolation
• Suicidal feelings and thoughts

Cognitive and developmental risks:

• Impaired brain development: In younger individuals, malnutrition can affect brain structure and cognitive functioning.
• Stunted growth: Delayed or permanently reduced growth due to hormone suppression.

Anorexia also has the highest mortality rate of all mental health disorders, due to both medical complications and suicide.

Help with anorexia

In order to beat anorexia, you need to recognise you need help and want to get better.

Realising you need help – and being open to getting it – is the important first step. Try talking to someone you trust about what’s going on such as a close friend or family member. We know this may be scary if you’ve been keeping it a secret for so long, but you deserve help and support for what you’re going through. If you’re not ready to talk to a close friend or family member we recommend you speak to your GP ASAP as they can refer you to best person to help. Read our article about treatments for eating disorders for more information. There are also plenty of online support groups that offer advice via email and over the phone – Beat (beating eating disorders) has a helpline with a call back service.

What are the long-term risks of anorexia?

Many people recover from anorexia and go on to have a better relationship with food and themselves.

But if left untreated over a long period of time anorexia can severely damage your health. Osteoporosis, where your bones get very brittle and can break easily, is a common side effect and is also irreversible.

If you’re female an eating disorder like anorexia can sometimes permanently affect your fertility.

Anorexia has the highest mortality rate of all eating disorders – another reason to get help if you can. Death is usually from heart failure, caused by the body going into starvation mode.

Given these long-term risks, it is therefore really important to get help as soon as you notice any symptoms by following the steps above.

Emily talks to Mix about her experience with anorexia and how with a little help from her friends and family, she overcame her eating disorder.

When I was younger I thought women were supposed to be thin. It was probably because I was obsessed with princesses, Barbie dolls and my mum – all of whom were slim. I was always quite skinny, so I didn’t really worry about my body in a big way until I was a teenager. That’s when I got a lot curvier, and I thought it was the most terrible thing.

I think my problem with body image was part of a bigger issue to do with low self-esteem. It doesn’t help that our society is so preoccupied with weight loss and dieting. The real problems started when I decided to go on a diet in a bid to feel better about myself. Like a lot of people who develop eating disorders, I’m a perfectionist, so the diet soon turned into a total obsession…

An obsession with counting calories

I became completely obsessed with numbers and would spend all of my time calculating calories and grams of fat. Even when I was in lessons at school or having conversations with people I would:

• Be frantically working out how much I could eat, how much weight I could lose, and over what period of time
• Do the same sums repeatedly just in case I was getting them wrong
• Re-read nutrition labels that I knew off by heart, just in case food companies had introduced more calories

It completely took over my life and I’d weigh myself several times a day. What I weighed completely dictated how I felt about my whole life. I used the scales not just to establish my weight, but also for measuring my self-worth.

Seeking help for anorexia

Quite early on my mum pleaded with me to go and see someone, but for a long time I was in denial and didn’t really think I had a massive problem. It was probably about 18 months after it first started that I actually decided I wanted to get better. Recovery is a massive challenge and you have to be really committed to it. It was only going to work when I was interested in doing it for myself.

Eating disorders are incredibly isolating. It’s partly because you’re so weak – you’re tired and hungry all the time, so you lose all interest in spending time with other people. Also, since nearly every form of socialising involves eating or drinking, I was reluctant to go out.

I wasn’t able to concentrate on any conversations I did have because my mind would wander off to think about food. I was irritable and cranky and generally became a fairly horrible human being. It was really hard for my friends and family to see my personality slowly draining away.

My wake-up call

I was aware that I looked unwell but, although it had all started with me wanting to look good, after a certain point my eating disorder stopped being about vanity. I was managing my food intake as a way of feeling in control of my life in general.

If I wasn’t eating very much and I was spending all of my time worrying about my weight, then I didn’t have the energy to worry about other insecurities. Although there was a rational part of me that was saying, ‘You’re too thin,’ and everyone was telling me that, I didn’t really care that much because I was clinging onto my anorexia as a way to cope.

The turning point came when my sister and best friend sat me down and told me that they were really worried about me. Seeing how much I’d upset them helped me realise how serious things had got. They were a connection back to my former normal life, so speaking to them about my eating disorder helped me look at the situation more rationally and objectively.

My anorexia recovery

It was scary when I started eating normally again. I suppose it’s the equivalent of someone telling a normal person to quadruple what they eat each day and it felt very unnatural at first. The cliche that anorexics have voices in their heads telling them not to eat was very true in my case.

A therapist once told me to try and think of my body as an instrument rather than an ornament, which I think is quite a positive message. I now feel very positive about my body – more than I did before the eating disorder. I thought I’d be happier if I was thinner and felt guilty about eating properly.

Now I know I’m far happier living in this body than I ever was in the thinner one and I’m a lot more relaxed about food.