So this week I’m going to be talking a bit about disordered eating, so firstly, what are eating disorders?

There are 5 types of eating disorder defined in the DSM, but there are others, the 5 defined in the DSM are:

1. Anorexia Nervosa

Anorexia has the highest mortality rate of all mental illnesses, involves severe food restriction and sometimes extreme exercising or other purging behaviours.

Symptoms: Intense fear of weight gain, rapid weight loss, staying underweight, refusal to acknowledge that such a low body weight can be harmful, lack of menstruation, heart conditions.

2. Bulimia Nervosa

Bulimia occurs when someone is repeatedly binging on large amounts of food and then purging it (through throwing up, over exercising, using diet pills and laxatives.

3. Muscle Dysmorphia

Unlike most eating disorders, this affects men more than women, it is characterised by an obsession with muscles and physique and achieving the perfect physical form.

4. Binge Eating Disorder

This is characterised by episodes of binge eating on large amounts of food. (a binge is consuming excessive amounts of food within a 2-hour period) this is accompanied by guilt and shame, and weight gain.

5. Other specified feeding or eating disorder

The last one is a bit of a catch all for eating disorders which don’t fit in to any of the other categories

There are however several other disorders, which don’t appear in the DSM, these include:

Compulsive overeating: Similar to binge eating disorder, but rather than over eating in two hour spurts, they will eat large amounts of food all day long.

Orthorexia Nervosa: When someone becomes so obsessed with dieting and health, that is disrupts their life.

Selective eating disorder: This disorder is a bit like picky eating but to an extreme, debilitating level, the individual is so selective about their food, that they become ill.