- Significant weight loss caused by strict dieting
- Preoccupation with food, weight, and body image
- Maintains rigid control over eating and schedules
- Extreme fear of gaining weight
- False body perception, sees herself as fat even when thin
- Rituals involving food and eating patterns
- Excessive exercise
- Cessation of menstruation, hair loss
- Sensitivity to cold
- Soft, downy hair that grows all over body
- Depression, irritability, difficulty concentrating
- May appear to feel superior, pure, virtuous, and powerful due to control over food
- Denies there is a problem
Anorexia is characterised by a dramatic restriction in food intake that results in significant weight loss of 15% to as much as 60% of body weight. Women with anorexia have an overwhelming fear of becoming fat, even though they may be painfully thin. Anorexia usually begins in adolescence and early adulthood, although women of all ages may be affected.
Anorexia often begins with a diet. A woman may feel uncomfortable and self-conscious as her body matures or changes, or ashamed of a body different from the superthin bodies our culture idealises. In the beginning, her diet resembles the dieting behaviour of many women. However, she often has an iron will and is able to remain dieting long after many women stop. People often tell her that she is thin and looks good, comments which she enjoys hearing.
On the outside, a woman with anorexia may appear confident and in control, even appearing superior to others due to her ability to lose weight and control her hunger. However, inside she is in agony. Women with anorexia feel constantly hungry and may experience continual hunger pains. As her weight decreases, so do the size of her meals: 3 grapes for lunch, 2 crackers for dinner. An anorexic's ability to combat her desire to eat gives her a sense of power and control.
Eventually, a woman's control over her food intake begins to take on a life of its own. She may become preoccupied with food and develop rituals around food. She may cut her food into tiny pieces, eat very slowly with long pauses between bites, or arrange her utensils in special patterns. Women with anorexia often spend a lot of time in the kitchen, preparing elaborate meals or mouth-watering desserts and encourage everyone else to eat while she denies herself even a taste. Anorexics, in an effort to avoid eating and meals, will often claim that they already ate, are eating later, or are not hungry. They also may rearrange their food on their plate or secretly throw food out in order to make it look like they have eaten.
An anorexic woman's fear of becoming fat increases as her weight decreases. A woman with anorexia may look in the mirror and see a body shape that is grossly overweight, even though she is skinny. She may focus on one part of her body as being huge and grotesque even though family members or friends see how painfully thin the despised body part has become.
In an effort to keep her weight and shape from being analysed and scrutinised, a woman with anorexia may wear several layers of baggy clothing to hide her shape. If taken to a doctor, she may load her pockets with rocks in order to weigh more on the doctor's scale.
A woman with anorexia may also appear like she is constantly moving. She may spend hours exercising or at the gym. Her workout routines may be rigidly structured like her eating patterns: run 6 miles then do 100 sit-ups followed by 100 leg lifts. She may get a sense of safety from keeping to these routines.
The physical effects of anorexia are those associated with malnutrition. A woman may experience dry skin, loss of hair, and a downy fuzz may grow all over her body. Menstruation may cease, or fail to begin, if the onset of anorexia occurs prior to puberty. Also, she may feel constantly cold. Kidney, bladder and bowel problems can effect fluid and electrolyte balance which can lead to heart problems. As a result, anorexics are often hospitalised in order to stabilise their weight due to the serious danger that such low body weight puts on the vital organs. At times, food deprivation may become overwhelming and an anorexic woman will eat in response to her hunger pains. She may binge on food, and fearful of gaining weight, attempt to get rid of the food through vomiting, taking laxatives, or excessive exercising. She may feel full of self-hatred and loathing that she wasn't able to resist eating. This pattern of behaviour is similar to the eating disorder bulimia.
Recent research has shown that the mental effects of Anorexia are those associated with malnutrition. Even though Anorexia is listed as a mental illness, the disturbance in the way in which one's body weight or shape is experienced and the intense fear and anxiety is caused by the extreme malnutrition rather than vice versa.
Women with anorexia often do not realise that they have a problem, since they perceive themselves as overweight, and in need of losing weight.
