NAIT Student Counselling

What is an Eating Disorder?

The term eating disorder refers to a set of eating habits, weight management practices and attitudes about weight and body shape that are caused by emotional problems. Eating disorders result in loss of control around food and often lead to obsession, anxiety, and guilt, alienation from yourself or others and/or physiological imbalances which are potentially life-threatening.

Eating disorders are experienced by both males and females and include anorexia nervosa, bulimia nervosa and compulsive overeating. All are serious emotional problems that can have life-threatening consequences.

People with anorexia have an intense and irrational fear of body fat and weight gain, an incredibly strong determination to become thinner and thinner and a misperception of body weight and shape. Thoughts about food, calories, weight and weight management dominate the person's life.

Bulimia is characterized by self-perpetuation and self-defeating cycles of binge-eating and vomiting. During a binge, the person consumes a large amount of food in a rapid, automatic and helpless fashion. The food may act like an emotional anesthetic but the person usually experiences physical discomfort and anxiety about weight gain. Therefore, the person makes her or himself vomit or uses a combination of restrictive dieting, excessive exercising, laxatives and/or diuretics.

Compulsive overeating is characterized by periods of impulsive gorging or continuous eating. Sporadic fasts or repetitive diets are common with compulsive overeaters, and body weight may vary significantly.

What Causes an Eating Disorder?

Eating disorders arise from a combination of long-standing psychological, interpersonal and social conditions. Feelings of inadequacy, depression, anxiety and loneliness, as well as troubled family and personal relationships, may contribute to the development of an eating disorder. Our culture, with its unrelenting idealization of thinness and the "perfect body," is often a contributing factor.

Dieting, bingeing and purging help some people cope with painful emotions and, initially, to feel more in control of their lives. At the same time, these behaviors undermine physical health, self-esteem and a sense of competence and control.

What are the Warning Signs?

• A marked increase or decrease in weight not related to a medical condition
• The development of abnormal eating habits (such as severe dieting, preference for unusual foods, withdrawn or ritualized behavior at mealtime, or secretive bingeing).
• An intense preoccupation with weight and body image
• Compulsive or excessive exercising
• Self-induced vomiting, periods of fasting, or laxative, diet pill, or diuretic abuse
• Feelings of isolation, depression or irritability

Who has Eating Disorders?

• While dieting is not an eating disorder, excessive dieting can promote the disorder. Half of North American women are dieting at any one time
• 75 percent of women are pre-occupied with weight
• between one and three percent are anorexic between three and five percent are bulimic about ten percent of college women surveyed had an eating disorder
• ten to twenty percent of women are affected by eating disorders but do not have all the symptoms

Statistics on men are not available.

How to Help a Friend You Think May Have an Eating Disorder

• Approach your friend in a private place when there is time to talk. Be caring but straightforward and tell your friend what you have observed and what your concerns are. Let him or her know that you are worried and want to help.
• Give the person time to talk and encourage them to verbalize feelings. Ask clarifying questions. Listen carefully and be non-judgmental.
• Try not to get into a power-struggle about whether there is a problem or not. Just let your friend know that you are concerned.
• Offer to help the person make an appointment with a counsellor. If they are resistant encourage them to consider going for one appointment before they make a decision about ongoing treatment.
• If the person denies the problem recognize that this is often part of the illness. Unless the person's life is in immediate danger they have the right to refuse treatment.
• Do not continually bring the subject up or the person will resent you and may start avoiding you. By talking with the person and offering help you have done all that is reasonably expected and have, hopefully, planted a seed that may lead the person to seek help in the future.

If you think you have an eating disorder see a counsellor at Student Counselling. Book in person at Room W111-PB, call 780-378-6133 or email ssd@nait.ca.