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Anorexia: What Is Normal?

01/Oct/2006: What is normal? It's hard to define what "normal" eating actually is, every person is different when it comes to appetite and the amount of food or calories we need to exist on.

So how do we define normal against abnormal?
Of course the easiest way to define it is we eat when we feel hungry and we stop eating when we feel full, for most of us three meals a day, breakfast, lunch and dinner is what's considered to be the normal.

We spend a lot of time and energy in dealing with food, choosing what we want to eat, pushing our cart around the supermarket filling it with enough food to last a week or two. Food plays a huge part in our daily lives, the choices are endless and we eat what we feel like at the time, some more healthily than others.

For most of us the biggest choice we have to make is meat or fish for dinner, many of us will at some time or other in our lives notice our pants getting a little tight around the waist or have trouble getting that zipper on our dress to pull up.

But the difference is we don't worry too much about it, maybe we'll take a little more care for a few weeks watching what we eat, cut out the fatty foods and pastries. But it doesn't become an obsession, we shed the few extra pounds by being careful but we still eat three good healthy meals a day.

What goes wrong when a person develops anorexia?

The person developing anorexia is normally not overweight but they are terrified of becoming overweight, they develop an intense fear that builds up until they are literally starving themselves to death.

The anorexic will have convinced themselves there are fat and it doesn't matter how much there friends and family tell them otherwise, they will look in the mirror and see an overweight person staring back at them.

The person suffering from anorexia will be hungry but the fear of actually digesting food is greater than there hunger. The anorexic will miss meals, often making excuses to eat alone where they will even go to the extent of hiding food if living with someone else.

They may start to exercise more, check there weight several times a day and be fastidious about it checking there tummy and thighs continuously.

When anorexia is deep set normality is long forgotten for the sufferer, school work and studying will become affected as will socialising. Indeed the anorexics life will slowly begin to to fall apart just as there body will rapidly deteriorate through lack of nutrients and calories.

Further Reading
http://www.anorexiasurvivalguide.com/

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