19th March 2024
Health

6 Common Types of Eating Disorders

Eating disorders are severe conditions related to resolute eating behaviors. This can often harm a person’s health, emotions, and the ability to perform in significant fields of growth.

Most of the eating disorders targets the weight of the body, fitness, and food leads to dangerous eating practices which can lead to numerous other diseases. These practices can significantly impact the body’s capacity to get the required vitamins and minerals. Prolonged eating disorders can also lead to failure of heart, digestive system, and problems in bones, teeth, and mouth.

These disorders often emerge in the early teen and young adult years, although they can also show up at other stages as well. With a goal-oriented treatment, one can substantially return to healthier eating habits. It can, in turn, reverse the severe complexities caused by them.

Causes:

The root cause of eating illness is still not known. Just like with other mental illnesses, there may be many causes like the following:

  • Genetics and biology: People may have genes that heighten their risk to elevate eating disorders. Biological factors like alterations in the brain chemicals also play a pivotal part in the rise of eating disorders.
  • Psychological and emotional health: Detection of this illness is done by monitoring the people that have mental and emotional problems. With the passage of time, a person suffering from an eating disorder may tend to have low self-esteem, impulsive, arrogant or rude behavior, and disturbed relationships.

Types and Symptoms:

  1. Anorexia Nervosa

 

This type of disorder usually emerges during puberty or young adulthood and tends to affect women mainly.

Even if they’re critically underweight, people with anorexia commonly view themselves as overweight. In usual cases, these people tend to invariably keep an eye on their weight, resist eating specific types of foods, and severely limit their calories.

Symptoms of anorexia nervosa include:

  • Compared to people of comparable age and height, the person is considerably underweight or malnourished
  • A ‘person’s unremitting chase of thinness and unwillingness to maintain healthy body weight
  • Distorted body form, inclusive of the disapproval of being dangerously thin
  • Obsessive-compulsive signs are also evident

Many people with anorexia are always preoccupied with persistent thoughts of food. Some may even get recipes or treasure foods impulsively. In extreme cases, anorexia can take a toll on heart health, brain or multi-organ related diseases, and finally death.

  1. Bulimia Nervosa

 

It appears to be less evident among men than women; bulimia tends to emerge during adolescence and early youth.

Large amounts of food consumption in a relatively short period are the feature of people having this disorder. Each binge-eating episode persists until that ‘person’s stomach aches. Furthermore, the person finds it difficult to control his desire to consume food despite being full. Moreover, people having this disorder usually have a relatively average weight, rather than turning out to be skinny.

Common symptoms of bulimia nervosa include:

  • Frequent incidents of indulgence eating, with a feeling of lack of power
  • Self-Esteem getting altered by body shape and weight
  • A phobia of gaining weight, despite possessing an average weight
  1. Binge Eating Disorder

This particular eating dysfunction emerges at any stage in one’s lifetime. People having this disorder have traits comparable to the people having bulimia.

Common symptoms of binge eating disorder include:

  • Despite not feeling hungry, the consumption of vast amounts of foods swiftly, secretly and until that person disturbingly full
  • Having a feeling of lack of charge during events of binge eating
  • Overweight or obese people have binge eating disorder. Heart disease, stroke, and type 2 diabetes are observed in people having this disorder for a prolonged time
  1. Pica

Individuals with pica incline towards eating non-edible food items such as ice, dirt, soil, chalk, soap, paper, hair, cloth, wool, pebbles, laundry washing powder, and even corn starch.

Pica can happen at all ages, whether in ‘one’s adolescence or in his adulthood. This sickness is common in children, pregnant women, and people with certain types of mental disabilities.

Poisoning, infections, injuries, and nutrition insufficiencies are other signs in the people having pica disorder because of the consumption of non-edible items regularly. Depending on the ingested things, pica can also be lethal or harmful to health to a level causing the early demise of the affected person.

  1. Rumination Disorder

The person regurgitates food they have previously chewed and swallowed in this particular condition. That person re-chews it and then re-swallows it or drools it off.

Notably, this disorder emerges during infancy, adolescence, or adulthood. It tends to develop between three and twelve months of infancy and often fades on its own. People have this condition usually require a quick remedial action to resolve it. Rumination disorder can influence anybody at any stage of their life. Then they chew and re-chew it again and according to their will, swallow it or spit it out.

Common symptoms of rumination disorder include:

  • People turning out to be uncomfortable in social gatherings like dining out with others etc
  • A delay in the food intake or a lower food consumption rate which can be a cause of lack of nutrients in the body

6 .Avoidant or Restrictive Food Intake Disorder (ARFID)

This disorder often results in the restriction from consuming all types of food, which in turn leads to a person falling prey to malnutrition.

What might happen to the body:

  • One might stay roughly the same weight or might go from being overweight to underweight pretty often
  • They may be dehydrated, which could lead to adverse skin
  • During menstruation, periods might become irregular or stop entirely
  • One turns sick, the stomach acid may harm the teeth, and they can get a sore throat
  • If one uses laxatives, they could develop irritable bowel syndrome (IBS), stretched colon, constipation.
  • One might weigh less than they should or lose weight fast
  • One might become physically underdeveloped
  • People turn out to be fragile and tender
  • One feels cold every time
  • Thinning or fall out of hair

A considerable amount of misguided information about eating disorders has led people to believe in the unseen. Also, the media plays a pivotal role in molding the thoughts of people regarding the falsity of bodies. Also, to track the treatment for the disease, a person can visit Treatment Tracker.