Feeding and Eating Disorders

Anorexia nervosa centers on restriction. Someone eats far less than their body needs until weight drops to a dangerously low level, yet when they look in the mirror they see a body that looks fine or even overweight. This is body image distortion, a core feature of the disorder: perception of size has come loose from reality. That false perception is not a side effect, it is part of what keeps the restriction going, because the person feels no urgency to eat more when the mirror seems to confirm they are not thin enough yet.

Bulimia nervosa runs on a different engine: a repeating cycle rather than steady restriction. Picture a week. Stress or hunger builds after a day or two of normal or restricted eating, then a binge happens, a discrete episode of eating an unusually large amount of food with a feeling of losing control. Shame and physical discomfort follow fast, so the person compensates: self-induced vomiting, laxatives, fasting, or excessive exercise. The compensation resets the guilt temporarily, tension builds again, and the cycle repeats, often several times a week. Because intake and compensation roughly balance out, body weight usually stays in a typical range, which is exactly why bulimia is easy to miss from the outside.

Both disorders sit next to anxiety and depression in this unit because body dissatisfaction and perfectionism feed all three, and treatment often targets the distorted thinking directly. Cultural shifts matter too: when media push thinner or more muscular ideals, body dissatisfaction rises in the population, and disorder prevalence tends to climb alongside it, especially among groups most exposed to those images.