What Are Eating Disorders

What Are Eating Disorders

What are eating disorders? First, I want to mention that eating disorders are not just about food and eating as most people think they are. Secondly, you must understand that these disorders involve feelings, emotions and a lack of self-control by the sufferers. In this article we look precisely at these.

1. Eating disorders are about feelings and emotions. For sufferers, food abuse helps them to respond to their intimate feelings. This response allows them to avoid, postpone, forget, deny or relieve their painful feelings.

For anorexics or bulimics, keeping a safe emotional distance prevents the risk that others will discover their real self and hurt them.

It turns out that nothing else other than binging-purging or starving themselves can bring them feelings of satisfaction. When they are asked to describe their life many of them say that they seem to be always in one way or the other like being on a crazy swing. They are either high on anorexia by not eating or high on bulimia from binging and purging.

Their feelings get distorted by their behaviours and at the same time they lack control because of their bed feelings and emotions.

These swinging emotions are called "brain loop" - when people's thoughts, feelings and behaviours get interconnected and they find themselves in a loop going around and around till it seems there is no way out of it.

To break this cycle can take a long time as sufferers have to learn how to feel good about themselves and to learn other means; not just by using food as a circuit breaker for their out of whack emotions. Fortunately this is now possible to do using the right methods.

2. Eating disorders are disorders of self-control. People start to believe (especially anorexics) that they can't control anything in their life except their food intake and their weight. They perceive that controlling their food intake and their weight enables them to keep their uncontrollable life in balance. They view their weight loss as an impressive achievement, a sign of extraordinary self-discipline; whereas, weight gain is perceived as an unacceptable failure of self-control.

The sufferers often want to be something they are not, so they try to compensate for this "loss" through their eating disorder. They think that they are more powerful as people if they are able to control their weight and food intake.

It is necessary to work on this strange way of thinking for a long time to make them finally understand that keeping their life under control has nothing to do with weight loss or weight gain: but has everything to do with the right attitude towards life.

People are not born with a "right attitude"... it is something that has to be learned and developed over time.

Eating disorders are more complicated than just this aspect, they are also about thought processes, coping strategies, self- identity, relationships, behaviour and much more. This complex combination makes eating disorders difficult to treat but fortunately not impossible when using the right strategies.

Like I said in Part 1, eating disorders are disorders of feelings, emotions and self-control. But they are also disorders of thinking and coping. In this article we look at these two more closely.

1. Eating disorder is a disorder of thinking (or the disorder of thought processes). People start thinking in a distorted way about themselves, the world, and their place in it. They thought that gaining even 1 kilo invariably leads to gaining 10 to 20 kilos.

Their misconception about how they look is called body image distortion. People think that they are fat although they are actually very thin. This is also called "broken eye syndrome" because people who have this syndrome see themselves in a mirror differently from what they really are. For instance, a skinny person sees a fat person look back at her/him.

This happens because the brain processes information received by the eyes in the wrong way. When their eyes see the image of a human body, the impulse goes from the eyes to the brain for interpretation of this image and this is where the mistake occurs - a wrong interpretation process in the mind is the result.

When people come to their therapists and asked to write their thoughts in a diary, they often write something like this: "I can't eat because I will get fat. I can't eat because what if I get out of control and it turns into a binge. I can't eat because I just had a binge last night. I can't eat now because I may as well wait until later when I can eat all I want and purge."

You can see their thought processes are far from being remotely normal: there is a strong preoccupation with food and the fear of becoming fat if they keep anything down.

All sufferers thoughts are related to food, eating or starving. Many sufferers also admit that they dream about food at night. Before they fall asleep they are dreaming of what food they could eat the next day and what these foods would taste like.

Sufferers have a strong fear of becoming fat. They always agonize about it and worried that this fear will never go away.

Another element of people's disordered thinking was a tendency toward rigid "black and white". For example, I am either perfect or I am not. There was no middle ground for them. One hour they may think they are the best and the next they feel like they were so bad that they even don't deserve to live.

Often sufferers think about other people this way too, for them they were absolutely great or horrible and low. There is no grey area for people with eating disorders.

It can take a long time to make them understand and accept that there are plenty of other colours in the world and that the "black and white" are only minority colours.

Leonardo Da Vinci once said "The greatest deception men suffer is from their own opinions." this applies to eating disorder sufferers completely

2. An eating disorder is a disorder of coping.

For sufferers, their eating disorder is the way they cope with everyday stress such as school, homework and pressure from their friends. Their eating disorder becomes their coping strategy. Most people do different things to relax and enjoy themselves (relieving stress) like knitting, gardening, decorating, reading, watching movies, but for eating disorder sufferer it is their ED.

Sufferers often have difficulty managing strong emotions, such as anger, sadness, boredom, and anxiety. They use food and starving or binging to help them manage their emotions; but it is possible for them to learn other coping strategies for the management of stress instead of abusing food.

There are much more to understand about eating disorders like, disorders of identity, values and lifestyle, relationships and behaviour. But that would be a next article.

Next Article

Dr Irina Webster MD is the Director of Women Health Issues Program. She is a recognised authority in the eating disorders area. She is the author of the published book "Cure Your Eating Disorder: 5 Step Program to Cure Your Brain". To learn more about Eating Disorder Books Cure Your Eating Disorder: 5 Step Program to Cure Your Brain" go to http://eating-disorders-books.com

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