Today, thin means beauty, success, and happiness to most people. Nearly every man, woman, and teen has suffered at one time or another from issues of weight, appearance or self image. Anorexia is a disorder where people who are not comfortable with their body image, diet and starve, which leads to excessive weight loss. Anorexics have a fear of fat, and they worry about weight gain, and how many calories or grams of fat they are consuming. One percent of all teenage girls in Canada develops anorexia, and up to 10% of those, may die as a result.
When diagnosed with this disease, the person may or may not know if he or she has a problem until the symptoms kick in. Some of them are, not eating regularly, skipping meals, and loss of appetite. Also, the anorexics peers may not notice anything until they see physical signs like, exhaustion, loss of hair, bags under their eyes, or increase of exercising, and of course, weight loss.
Anorexics may have other eating problems that go along with their harmful disease, such as bulimia. This is a disorder in which after people eat, the food gets thrown up almost all the time. After a bulimic person binges on food they may feel depressed or ashamed. This can lead to forced vomiting, abusing the use of laxatives or diet pills, exercising excessively, or fasting. The victim may not be visibly underweight, but may even be slightly overweight. Like anorexic people, dangerous signs of bulimia may include, eating uncontrollably, using the bathroom frequently after meals, and depression just to name a few.
Some people may not know how dangerous anorexia nervosa is. The victims may think that they will just become anorexic until they've reached a desired weight they"d like to be at. However, once they achieve their goal, it's not that hard to stop. If the person is bulimic, and purges after every meal, their body will get used to the vomiting, and makes that part of it's "daily" routine.
