Anorexia - What is it?

Key points for people with anorexia

• Anorexia is a serious medical condition, not just a phase or a fad.
• If you have anorexia, you may not be able to admit you have a problem. And you may not want treatment.
• You dread getting fat. And you think you are fat even when you are much too thin and weigh too little for your height.
• Having anorexia seriously damages your health. It makes you starve your body of the food it needs to work properly.
• It is possible to get better. You can put on weight and keep it on. And you can change how you think about weight and food. But it's not easy.
• Most people think of anorexia as something women get. But men can get it too.

You may think that a close friend or someone in your family has anorexia. To learn more about the signs to look for, see Worried someone close to you might have anorexia?

What's normal eating?

It's hard to say what 'normal eating' is. A lot more has been written about what's not normal.

Usually, eating normally means you eat when you feel hungry and stop when you feel full. These feelings are partly controlled by chemicals in your brain. Most of us eat three meals a day, with a couple of snacks in between.

Food plays a big part in most of our lives. We spend a lot of time shopping for and preparing food. When we meet friends or relatives, we often eat together. How do we decide what to eat? We make choices because of our lifestyle and attitudes toward food and health, but also because of what tastes good.

Some people think about food or their body size more than others. Many people, especially women, worry about their weight and try to control how much they eat.

But whether we think about food a lot or a little, worry about it or just enjoy it, our feelings about food don't usually stop us from living a normal life.

What goes wrong in anorexia?

If you have anorexia, you worry about food and your weight a lot more than most people do.

• You are frightened about getting fat.
• You think you are fat, and you think other people think you are too.
• You spend most of your time thinking about how much you weigh and how you look. You become obsessed with losing weight.[1] [2]
• Fear of putting on weight is part of having anorexia. You may have other fears too. You may fear losing control. You probably worry about other people finding out that you have anorexia. You may be afraid of being told that you have a mental health problem.

These kinds of thoughts and worries go round and round in your head.

Here's a list of some things you may do if you have anorexia. You may:

• Miss meals or avoid eating, even when you feel hungry
• Hide food or keep a lot of it around (hoard it)
• Cut your food up into tiny pieces and push it around your plate to look as though you've eaten some
• Avoid eating with others
• Deny that you have a problem with food
• Carefully weigh your food and only eat small quantities
• Get rid of the calories you've eaten by making yourself throw up or by taking laxatives
• Do other things to lose weight, such as exercising more than is healthy[3]
• Check your weight all the time and examine your body in the mirror (especially your tummy, thighs and bottom)
• Worry about your weight so much that you don't have time for studying, working or socialising. The rest of your life can start to fall apart.[4]

But anorexia is not just about how you feel about food. It's also about how you feel about yourself.

If you have anorexia, you can't see that you are very underweight. You may feel deeply unhappy.

Starving yourself can seem like a way to control difficult emotions and stress. You may think that losing weight is the key to a better, happier and more successful life.

Anorexia is a real and serious illness. It's not a diet that's gone wrong or a fad. It's one of the group of illnesses called eating disorders, along with bulimia and binge-eating.[1] To learn more, see Other eating disorders.

If you think you have problems with food, there are some questions you can ask yourself. These are the questions doctors use to help them decide if you have an eating disorder.

Why me?

There's no simple reason why someone gets anorexia, and we don't know what causes eating disorders. It's probably a combination of the genes you're born with and the things that happen in your life that lead to anorexia. Here's a list of some of the things that have been linked to anorexia.

• Emotional problems
• Dieting
• Wanting to look like models on television and in magazines
• An imbalance of chemicals in the brain
• Genes and family history.

For more information, see Possible causes of anorexia.

Some people are more likely to get anorexia than others. Things that can increase your chances of getting an illness are called risk factors. The risk factors for anorexia include:

• Having low self-esteem (thinking you are worthless and not giving yourself any credit when things go well)
• Wanting to be perfect as a child and always doing exactly what you're told
• Having mental health problems such as depression, anxiety or an obsessive way of thinking
• Being competitive.

For more information about this, see Who's at risk of getting anorexia?