Support for anyone witha mental disorder
Support for anyone withA person has an eating disorder when they use food to work out their emotional problems. In a sense, a person with an eating disorder has an addiction to food or to dieting, rather like an alcoholic or drug addict. If you suffer from an eating disorder you are constantly preoccupied with food, weight, and dieting. Friends, family, and schoolwork or just work become less and less important. No matter what other good things happen-- food, weight, and dieting becomes ways to avoid all the other issues in your life.
Besides eating to satisfy the body's hunger, people eat to be sociable, to celebrate, or just to have something to do. Nutritious food raises your blood sugar slowly, while sweet, starchy foods raises it quite quickly, a sugar rush that is usually followed by a crash. The compulsive eater may have trained oneself to look for these reactions--a very full stomach, a quick rush of blood sugar. Seeking these reactions practically guarantees that they will eat more food than their body needs while almost continually feeling hungry.
Some people have a condition that further affects their relationship to hunger. That condition is known as hypoglycemia, which, in a sense, is the opposite condition of diabetes. Diabetics can't produce enough insulin to process their blood sugar. Hypoglycemic produce too much. As a result, their blood sugar is processed much more quickly than others, and it falls to unpleasantly low levels more quickly as well. In a matter of a few hours without food, they feel like they are starving to death and sometimes even hallucinate or black out.
Anorexics--people who suffer from anorexia nervosa--never believe that they are thin enough. They may weigh only three-fourths of the weight that is normal for their height and build. To their family and friends, they look like prison-camp victims, so thin that you can see every rib.
Sometimes anorexics begin their disorder by being of normal weight, and then they put on a few pounds then they go into a panic trying to lose it. As they diet the initial weight gain away, they begin to become obsessed with diets, weight loss, and appearance. They don't stop their diet when they reach their former normal weight but continue to diet and perhaps exercise obsessively. They may also use vomiting, laxatives, diet pills, and diuretics to help them lose weight.
Whether or not the anorexic has ever been overweight, they're likely to find an exciting sense of power and control through dieting. Dieting, they discover, means they can decide how their body will look and what the scale will say. Although most people who intend to lose weight feel a sense of pleasure and power in achieving their goal, the anorexic is pleased out of all proportion to what actually happened.
The bulimic is usually quite successful in their work, school, and social life. Neither their behavior nor their appearance gives any sign of their eating disorder. A bulimic may have relaxed eating habits when they aren't binging, or they may try to live on a rigidly controlled diet. They may feel that any break in their diet will lead to a binge, or their binges may be triggered by non-food-related events, such as anxiety over an exam. Most bulimics are of average weight, give or take 10 or 15 pounds. Whatever their actual weight, however, they tend to share an intense fear of becoming fat.
Most people have had experience of, say, eating a pint or two of ice cream at one sitting, or having seconds and thirds of a favorite meal until they were so stuffed they couldn't move. A bulimic binges like this at least once a week or more. A binge ranges from 1,000 to 20,000 calories at a time and may last for hours or even days. After the binging they vomit or find some other way of getting the food out of their system.
