- What are eating disorders?
- Difference between anorexia and bulimia
- Symptoms and consequences of eating disorders
The social and media demand that we have about how our body should look to be "perfect", that is, to meet the beauty standard that society and consumerism have invented and have given us imposed, has resulted in serious problems with our self-esteem and self-acceptance
These problems turn into frustrations and insecurities because of the way we perceive our body, but on other occasions they end up in serious eating disorders. The best known are anorexia and bulimia and they are quite different.Learn about the difference between anorexia and bulimia and detect its symptoms
What are eating disorders?
Eating disorders or eating disorders are extreme manifestations of emotional disorders that originate in our social, psychological, and biological environment , since it is a distorted body self-image, excessive fear of weight gain and volume change in the body due to an established image or standard of beauty to which we have given more values. The most famous of these diseases are anorexia nervosa (AN) and bulimia nervosa (BN).
There is a difference between anorexia and bulimia, but the two share psychological factors characteristic of an eating disorder: low self-esteem, difficulty of perceiving and accepting oneself, low ability to face problems and frustration.People with this problem are excessively critical of their body and feel a high desire for perfectionism that is never attainable.
If we add to all this the demand of society and the cult of a totally thin body and the values of beauty , superiority, happiness and success that are associated with it, you have the inevitable mixture for an eating disorder.
Most worrisome is that the numbers of people suffering from anorexia and bulimia continue to rise, especially among adolescents. This is the age at which we build our identity, with women especially being the most affected in a ratio of 10 to 1 compared to men.
Difference between anorexia and bulimia
While these two eating disorders are characterized by a rejection or fear of body weight, they manifest in two completely different ways. Here we explain the difference between anorexia and bulimia.
Anorexy
When we talk about anorexia nervosa we refer to those people who have a fear and total rejection of weight gain, for which they practice self-starvation (self-refusal of meals) as a weight loss mechanism , terribly affecting he alth; Weight loss becomes an obsession and brings metabolic, renal, cardiovascular and dermatological complications.
This weight loss occurs abruptly, leaving the person below the he althy minimum in a short time. There are those who stop eating completely, but it may also be that they eat very little, consuming only a few foods and water, for which the body does not receive any nutrients. In the most extreme cases, people who suffer from it can use laxatives to lose weight even faster.
The most worrying thing about this condition is that despite having reached the lower limits of weight, these people fail to see their thinness.On the contrary, when they are in front of the mirror they continue to think that they have to lose more weight, due to the distorted self-image they have and that also makes them suffer emotionally. We see this eating disorder especially in adolescent women, but more and more adult women are beginning to suffer from it.
Bulimia
The main difference between anorexia and bulimia is that although in both we find an obsession with keeping weight low, people with bulimia eat, unlike people with anorexia who suffer from self-starvation or eat very little.
Bulimia nervosa is an eating disorder in which people have cyclical moments of binge eating in which they eat uncontrollably. Then they compensate for these excesses with purges to avoid gaining weight, such as vomiting, excessive hours of exercise, laxative abuse, and they can even restrict eating again for many hours.
People with bulimia also have an extreme fixation on their body image, but in this case the weight loss is more slowly and does not become noticeable abruptly, due to the binge eating they have.
A big difference between anorexia and bulimia is that, in general, people with anorexia nervosa have histories of eating disorders such as obesity in their family. In the case of people with bulimia, these are unsatisfied emotional needs that they try to satisfy with uncontrolled eating, which they must then eliminate to maintain weight .
Anxiety, sadness and depression are common factors in people who suffer from anorexia and bulimia.
Symptoms and consequences of eating disorders
As we mentioned at the beginning of this article, eating disorders are the result of a long list of different types of symptoms.These symptoms, instead of being different between anorexia and bulimia, are rather shared by the two diseases to a greater or lesser extent and we can divide them into three groups: psychological, behavioral and emotional.
Psychological symptoms include obsession with weight and excessive fear of gaining weight; negative thoughts about eating, body image, and weight; distortion in one's own body image; decreased creative abilities and concentration, and abstraction in thoughts.
From the behavior, symptoms include restrictive diets or binge eating, rejection of certain foods, use of extreme methods to eliminate consumed foods such as ingesting laxatives or vomiting, obsessive-compulsive behaviors, and social withdrawal.
On an emotional level the symptoms are depression, anxiety, deep sadness, phobias and in some cases suicidal ideas.
Now that you know the difference between anorexia and bulimia, their causes and their devastating consequences, ask for help if you, a family member or your friends may be suffering from one of these diseases. There are many assistance centers you can go to in your city.