How To Identify Symptoms of Anorexia Nervosa

Eliminating anorexia is truly a battle for healthy body image, but it is something that you cannot conquer by yourself. Often, victims have such distorted images of themselves that they will need intervention from outside sources to even be able to admit that they have the problem. In fact, you may already be fostering this disorder without knowing it.

Anorexia nervosa, while commonly linked to bulimia, is one of the many eating disorders that had dangerously claimed many women’s lives. An anorexic or bulimic often has this distorted body image that leads her to act irrationally in terms of food and dieting.

1. Severe weight loss. A telltale sign of anorexia nervosa is severe weight loss—if a person is already losing weight at alarming speed and is steadily losing it below the normal weight for her height. Dieting is often the beginning of the disorder. Some just manage to transcend to a healthy lifestyle after losing weight and taper off gradually. Others, unfortunately, become anorexic through an obsession or mania for losing weight.
2. Severely restricting habits on food. If you are really imposing severe restrictions on your food intake, with an almost manic tendency to count calories even to the point of starvation, then you are in danger of becoming anorexic.
3. Purging or engaging in binging. The other type of symptom among anorexics, if they are not the restricting type, is the purging symptom or binge eating. People who purge eat a lot and then induce themselves to vomit whatever little they have eaten so that it won’t be stored in their body as fat are described as bulimic - this can go hand-in-hand with anorexia and other eating disorders.
4. Distorted body image. A person who has anorexia thinks she is fat even when others see her as emaciated and stick-thin. She sees in the mirror a very distorted image and refuses to believe other people even when they tell her that she is of normal weight or severely underweight
5. Intense fear or alarm at the thought of gaining weight. Those who lost weight have the tendency to fear regaining the pounds and this is normal. But if it comes to the point where a person does irrational things just to prevent the added pounds from coming in, then that is already beyond normal. People who have anorexia nervosa tend to make a big fuss of even a pound’s additional weight, and do their best in the extreme to keep that from happening.
6. Premium on being thin over being healthy. For anorexics, being thin is the be-all and end-all of happiness. It is more important to them than being healthy and eating a balanced diet. They will even go as far as intentionally starving themselves to become or stay thin.

Some of the symptoms or signs of anorexia are subtle and may even be contradicting. To objectively identify whether your loved one is exhibiting symptoms of anorexia nervosa or just under some sort of stress, you need to have constant supervision of that person. You can’t just judge by a single isolated instance if a person is already in need of treatment for bulimia or anorexia nervosa.