What Are Eating Disorders?

An eating disorder is usually described as an extreme compulsion to eat (or the lack of it), which has negative effects on your body and disturbs your physical health. Although there are several types of eating disorders known to medicine, the most common trio is that composed of bulimia nervosa, anorexia nervosa and the Binge eating disorder. The three conditions manifest themselves differently and they have distinct causes and effects, but they are all equally dangerous to our health and may even lead to death in more severe cases. Besides these three, there are several other eating disorders that are encountered less frequently or have milder effects, hence they are not viewed upon with the same reluctance. These are hyperphagia, rumination, pica and a handful of others.

Anorexia nervosa is both an eating disorder and a psychiatric one at the same time. It is usually associated with body image distortion and is mostly encountered on women than on men. The fixed idea that they need to carve their body to a specific form deemed by our society as "perfect" leads individuals to harsh eating habits such as voluntary starvation, excessive exercise, taking diuretic drugs, taking diet pills and so forth. These are all components of the anorexia nervosa eating disorder and they may have extremely unhealthy effects on the stomach, esophagus and to the entire digestive system.

Purging through vomiting, laxatives and the "chewing and spitting" method are usually related to bulimia rather than anorexia. Bulimia has similar psychological causes but the main idea behind it is to "trick" the body in the eating process. By eating an excessive amount of food, individuals get the pleasure of eating what they want without caring for the nutritional value of what they eat and then by vomiting it out for example, the fat and calories from the food are eliminated. This process has two main negative aspects. By vomiting, acid forms up in the stomach and esophagus which can get damaged quickly and the body doesn't receive the required amount of vitamins, minerals and other nutritional elements from the food, mainly because the digestive system doesn't have time to extract them before they get purged.

So as you could see, in both these cases, an eating disorder is in 90% of the time triggered by psychological factors. The other 10% may include intolerance to some forms of food. For example, an individual may acquire a calcium eating disorder because of his lactose intolerance, although the causes for his intolerance may not be entirely psychological.

Medicine also considers having an unhealthy diet as an eating disorder. For example, a daily diet that includes a lot of fast-food, excessive roasted food, excessive coffee and alcohol drinking, lack of vegetables and fruit and other similar diets may form an eating disorder, or in time, lead to one. These diet eating disorders may not have a psychological cause, but they can easily be caused by our fast paced daily schedule or simply by the lack of variation in one's eating habits.