Eating disorders

An eating disorder is when someone becomes obsessively controlling over their eating habits. Eating disorders can cause various health problems like malnutrition, can interfere with your body’s development, can affect your menstrual cycle and in serious cases even cause death.

There are different types of eating disorders. The most commonly discussed are Anorexia Nervosa and Bulimia Nervosa. Anorexia is when you limit your food intake beyond the safe amount, and have a complex relationship with food, your body and the effect food has on your body. Bulimia can have aspects of limiting your food intake too, but include “binging” and “purging” as well – meaning that food is eaten in large amounts and then gotten rid of after by either vomiting or through misuse of laxative or diet pill.

Having an eating disorder can make the idea of eating or not being in control of what you put into your body very scary. This can be because of control issues associated with eating disorders – the deeper problem is quite often about something else in life that you feel out of control of, and so you excessively control your diet in order to make yourself feel more in control of your life in general.

If you feel like you might be struggling with an eating disorder, try reaching out for help from organisations that understand what you are going through. Your family and friends having support and information about eating disorders is helpful too so that they can know the right way to support you.