What are eating disorders and why are they dangerous?

The publishing house "Bombora" published a book by psychologist Zhenya Donova "Food monster. Why we overeat, gain weight and how to form the right relationship with food. We publish an excerpt from chapter 9 about what signs indicate eating disorders.

Eating disorders - these are deformations in relations with food and the body, which are in the interval between the norm and psychopathology. In simple words, this is when it is still impossible to say that a person has an eating disorder, but it is already obvious that something has gone wrong in eating behavior.

What can be attributed to eating disorders?

Restrictive Violations

1. Constant thoughts about food, weight and weight loss.
2. Frequent weighing and dependence of mood on the number on the scales.
3. The feeling of fat - I'll tell you more about it later.
4. Anxiety about food, guilt about what you have eaten.
5. Constant monitoring of others in order to compare them with yourself in terms of weight.
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6. Desire to lose weight when it is normal or low.
7. Obsessive diets, breakdowns, overeating. The extreme forms of such disorders are anorexia nervosa, bulimia nervosa, and orthorexia nervosa.

Emotional (emotional) disorders

1. Eating regularly to drown out emotions: fatigue, sadness, anger, boredom, loneliness, anxiety, etc.
2. Frequent snacking and raids on the refrigerator without feeling hungry is a compulsive type of nutrition, when food constantly accompanies a person in different life situations.

Extreme forms - night eating syndrome and paroxysmal overeating.

External disorders (or disorders of the externally oriented type)

1. Chaotic, unsystematic nutrition.
2. Overeating in situations of abundance (feasts, birthdays, smorgasbords, or when the food is just in front of your eyes).

This type of overeating is not directly related to any particular eating disorder, but rather stems from a person’s inability to focus on themselves and their feelings. That is why the external type of nutrition is typical, for example, for people with ADHD. However, such violations often "stick" to other types of violations. For example, if a person constantly restricts himself in nutrition, then it will be more difficult for him to stop on time at a friend's birthday party.

General violations

1. Inadequate perception of the body: when you see only the bad in the mirror, not perceiving the picture as a whole.
2. Constant dynamics of weight (jumps of 2-3 kilograms do not count).
3. Loss of hunger and satiety.

As you can see, here the scope is greatly expanded. If you have met one or two people in your life with anorexia or bulimia, then people with malnutrition are a dime a dozen.

Worst of all, more often than not, people with NSP don't get adequate help, they don't even know there's anything wrong with them.

Diet culture has brainwashed us so much that a huge number of people consider it completely normal. constantly limit yourself in nutrition, at the same time have an unhealthy passion for the forbidden, break down and come back again to the diet. They do not even think about the fact that this is a pathology with which it is important to work.

Why are NPPs scary?

• They are the forerunner of RPP (not all RTP lead to the development of RPP, but all RPP start with RPP).
• They undermine health (weight jumps, overeating, increased anxiety).
• They reduce the quality of life and take away resources from other areas.

I will dwell on the connection between the RPP and the NPP in more detail.

Imagine a girl with anorexia nervosa. She weighs 35 kilograms, can barely walk, refuses food and liquids to keep the weight off. Naturally, any doctor will confirm that this is a life-threatening condition that requires immediate attention.

But all this did not happen to the girl at once! Here she is happy, healthy and with a normal weight went to bed, and the next day she woke up near death. No! The disease lasted and developed for months.

At first she decided to go on a diet, being at a normal weight (the first wake-up call), then she began to obsess over food and eat very little (second alarm), then her weight dropped below normal, but she could not stop (third alarm bell).

All this is not yet anorexia nervosa - these are eating disorders, red flags that the composition of eating behavior is rushing into the cliff. A competent specialist, if you turn to him in time, will suspect something was wrong and intervene.

There are great difficulties with the diagnosis of NPP, especially in our country.

If Anya lived in the USA and went to the doctor, most likely she would have been diagnosed OSFED and sent to a course of psychotherapy.

In our country, with a high degree of probability, Anya will be told that she does not have any eating disorder, that she just needs less to eat, and handed a leaflet with a diet for 1200 calories, after which she would move back to the nervous anorexia. And this is very sad.

The good news is that there are still adequate specialists, and every year there are more and more of them. What was my surprise when a few years ago I came to see a gastroenterologist with stomach pain and she said to me:

- I will not prescribe any strict diet for you. Diet tables provoke the development of eating disorders. Try and choose food for yourself, excluding and adding different foods.

What can I say? This is progress.

A competent evidence-based psychiatrist will see the problem and refer the patient with NSP to a psychologist. The formalist doctor will brush aside and write everything down to willpower, or rather, to its absence. Look for competent doctors. Fortunately, telemedicine is now developing, it is possible to receive online consultations from anywhere in the world.

I promised to tell you about the feeling of fat. It is such a feeling when, after a heavy meal, the body seems to increase in size, the fat layer grows, and the clothes begin to put pressure on the body a little more than it was before eating. This feeling is a frequent companion of eating disorders.

The brain signals anxiety associated with weight gain and guilt over what you have eaten.

In other words, this feeling is unreal.

To gain at least one kilogram of pure fat (I think it is still possible to feel such a sharp weight gain), you need to eat about 7.5-8 thousand calories PLUS your daily intake. That is, you ate breakfast, lunch, dinner, a couple of snacks and ate two or three whole cakes during the day. And then! In this case, a whole kilogram will not even be able to form once, because the body has defense mechanisms.

It is, of course, not about the real weight gain in a particular second, but about emotions that are difficult to cope with. A person ate something forbidden - the brain focuses on the feeling of satiety, on how the stomach has grown after eating, on how the clothes come into contact with the body. This is where the absolutely real feelings of ChJ arise from. […]

The book "Food Monster" will help you find out where dissatisfaction with your own body comes from, and understand how to build the right relationship with food without harming the body and psyche.

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