Anorexia Nervosa - Symptoms & Treatment

Health & FitnessMedicine

  • Author Genelia Mark
  • Published February 19, 2010
  • Word count 562

Anorexia nervosa is eating disorder characterized by low body weight and body image distortion with an obsessive fear of gaining weight. Anorexia nervosa is a serious, often chronic, and life-threatening eating disorder defined by a refusal to maintain minimal body weight within 15 percent of an individual's normal weight.Since having enough food to eat was the most important thing for people in the past being ample was considered prestigious; the beauty standards were set by the environment that people lived in and the ideas of how shapely and curvaceous a human body was supposed to be were derived in a similar manner.

Symptoms of Anorexia Nervosa

An intense fear of gaining weight.

A distorted body image.

Amenorrhea.

Skin dryness or flakiness.

Brittle nails and hair.

Intolerance to cold.

Dehydration.

Denial of feeling hungry.

Living their life around food.

How to treat Anorexia Nervosa

If not treated at the earliest signs anorexia nervosa can become a life long problem, leading to other health problems as mentioned earlier. Treatment would involve a doctor, dietitian and a therapist all working in unison to help the individual back to a proper state of health.

NLP and hypnotherapy are excellent tools to help stop anorexia nervosa once and for all. They work by altering the patterns of thought from those that are conducive to an anorexic pattern to something less favorable for anorexia to take hold. This method is further enhanced by using hypnotherapy along with it in order to enhance feelings of peace, acceptance, happy thoughts, and positive eating habits.

Self-hypnosis is a wonderful addition to overcome anorexia nervosa because it complements psychotherapy, cognitive therapy and behavioral interventions. You no longer have to struggle with your core beliefs and self-image when you adopt hypnosis as anorexia self help.

With body image, you apply the BAR Cycle to specifically reprogram how you see your body. To counteract the false belief about being fat, we can get objective data, like the Body Mass Index (BMI), that specifically describes our healthy weight, based on height. You can weigh yourself and use an online BMI Calculator to regularly monitor your weight.

Keep close to your loved ones. They are valuable resources that can serve to help improve your anorexia self help attempts. Consult your primary physician or psychologist about your concerns. They can develop a plan of interventions to make your self-help approaches more effective.

The person will start to develop odd food rituals such as eating foods in a particular order and arranging the foods in a certain way on the plate. The person will also begin to excessively chew their food in the hopes that more will be digested and less will turn to fat.

Lots of people improve by the time of their discharge from the hospital but the treatment for anorexia nervosa should not finish there. Relapses at home after hospitalization is extremely common, over 95% of all sufferers have some kind of problem. Actually much more people do relapse than those who do not, a scary statistic for the sufferer.

Recovering from anorexia nervosa is not easy, it requires the patient to accept that she needs help and support, otherwise is very difficult and you will only be able to reduce the symptoms like depression, thats why the support of the family and friends is very important in making the patient want to look for help.

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