Anorexia affects more and more young people. What is the cause of this disorder and the essence? What makes women starve themselves and continue to struggle with extra pounds when the body is brought to exhaustion?
It all starts like this: a girl looks in the mirror and decides that she needs to lose weight in order to look good. She sharply limits her diet, denying herself any food, not only excessively high-calorie ones. Then she reaches complete exhaustion, becomes very thin and loses her strength. But she continues to refuse food and, looking in the mirror, claims that she has not lost enough weight yet.
Fear and persuasion of relatives, warnings of doctors cannot stop her. Sometimes there is no escape from the feeling of hunger, and she eats more than she considers acceptable. It is difficult for her to accept a violation of her own principles, and often after such an “overeating” she arranges artificial vomiting for herself. The stronger the pressure of doctors and nutritionists, the more persistently the parents demand to stop this mockery of themselves, the more stubbornly the girl continues her hunger strike.
This is what anorexia nervosa looks like. I wrote an article explaining the psychological mechanisms of this disease. I received a lot of feedback to support my point of view and here are some of them:
- “I suffered from anorexia ten years ago. I practically got out myself when I realized that it was already hard to walk … “
- “I want to note that the author understands the essence of the problem very correctly and correctly approaches its solution. Almost the first sensible article of those that I met on the net about this.
- “I often analyzed my deviant eating behavior. Much of this article almost literally corresponds to my judgments and conclusions.
- “My friend copes with many life tasks, she learned Dutch, found a job. But she never stopped starving.
- “I graduated from school with a gold medal and an institute with honors, went to England on an exchange, now I have a prestigious job and salary, and I am also married to a very good man. Very purposeful, I achieve everything myself … But, my dears, this is somehow not so. Don’t tell me I’m mad about fat. I have been suffering from anorexia for 8 years. And I get sick, and I can’t recover, even though I’ve been to psychiatrists. Thanks a lot for the article. Perhaps you are right. Probably, if I do some extreme sports – it will pass?
Especially often intellectually developed and capable girls are prone to anorexia nervosa. They are successful and easy to learn. Therefore, an attempt to explain the refusal of food by depressive disorders is not always inadequate. Depressed patients find it difficult to study, and most importantly, it is difficult for them to show such perseverance in achieving goals.
Refusal to eat is indeed one of the symptoms of depression. But it is associated with a decrease in appetite, which in anorexia nervosa is not only preserved, but increased due to chronic malnutrition. It is with their appetite that anorectics fight. In addition, antidepressants restore appetite, along with normalization of mood, but with anorexia they often increase food refusal.
The erroneous perception of her own body is unlikely to explain the almost hallucinatory state in which the girl is. She sees herself in the mirror completely exhausted, sometimes losing tens of kilograms, and still repeats that she is still too fat. Obviously, she feels the need to see herself as fat. And this desire reduces the ability to perceive reality, but only in relation to itself.
Young women with anorexia nervosa have very low self-esteem, and no amount of success can improve it. They know how to deal with learning difficulties. But in situations that require the search for new solutions, they often become helpless. Even in childhood, due to the giftedness or excessive guardianship of their parents, they were not able to develop a mechanism for adapting to the real world. Unforeseen difficulties are frightening, and they often give up. It is difficult for them to be flexible or see their own behavior from the outside, much less change it.
It is their way of actively coping with difficulties and compensating for feelings of helplessness in other areas of life.
The essence of anorexia nervosa lies in the strange pleasure that they get from the process of fighting hunger. Therefore, they do not try to alleviate the hunger strike by taking drugs that reduce appetite. This is their way of actively overcoming difficulties, a form of search and compensation for feelings of helplessness and passivity in other areas of life. Of course, this is not constructive compensation; with anorexia, the search for a way to overcome it is dangerous.
In the treatment of anorexia, it is not the rejection of food that needs to be fought. It is necessary to explain to patients the true mechanism of their struggle for weight loss. First of all, the girl must understand the essence of what is happening to her. Then it is important to help remember situations when she was able to cope with difficulties in a constructive way.