Eating disorders, pt 1: anorexia nervosa
By: Courtney Gallant
Anorexia, which is clinically known as Anorexia Nervosa, is a disorder that touches the lives of countless people at one time or another. Someone you know and love may be suffering from this disease without anyone knowing, until it progresses far enough that drastic physical changes are noticed. Anorexia - or any eating disorder - is very hard on both the sufferer and the people around them, because there is such a stigma around it. Some people still believe that it is the choice of the person, and can't seem to understand that it is a mental disorder, and the fact that it is a mental disorder can add further stigma to it. If you believe someone you love is suffering from this disease, it may be difficult to talk to them about it, because they may not know or understand what is happening to them. And confronting someone who is simply naturally thin and asking "are you anorexic?" can cause even more problems. To understand more about the dangers of anorexia, it is important to understand what it is.
Anorexia is a psychological disorder that mainly affects adolescent females, although approximately ten percent of people diagnosed with anorexia nervosa are male. That's not to say that it can only affect people who fit into this age group - anorexia nervosa can affect anyone from any walk of life. This eating disorder is mainly the byproduct of a distorted body image, and an intense fear of gaining weight. This intense fear of gaining weight is 'controlled' in the eyes of the sufferer by voluntary starvation, excessive exercise, taking diet pills and diuretics, among others.
Anorexia nervosa is diagnosed and treated as a mental disorder, rather than a physical one, because it is the distorted body image and fear of weight gain and obesity that drives the patient to the disorder. These patients tend to believe that to be in control of one’s body weight is to be in control of one’s life, and many sufferers of anorexia nervosa have shown signs of having Obsessive Compulsive Disorder, having a preoccupation or obsession with food, and seem overly compliant.
Some of the immediate effects of anorexia nervosa include fatigue, dizziness, depression, loss of interest in sexual activity, low blood pressure, frequent urination, constipation, feeling cold constantly regardless of surrounding temperature, growth of fine hairs over the body, and in females, absence of normal menstrual cycles. Some of the long term side effects of this disease are damage to the teeth, loss of muscle tissue - including the muscle tissue of the heart - loss of brain tissue and bone mass, and can lead to anemia and kidney failure. If it remains undiagnosed and untreated, anorexia nervosa can be fatal.
People who suffer from anorexia nervosa are rarely 'cured' and tend to have reoccurring episodes with the disease, because the behavior and ideas are so deeply rooted in the individual. It is very important for sufferers of this disease to have the support they need when trying to overcome this overwhelming sickness. It can be extremely difficult for people to overcome this, but it can be done as long as the individual has a desire to overcome the illness, and the support of those close to them.
Did you Know....
By: Julie Keenan
I was reading an article in Psychology Today about myths and rumors. It discussed how and why rumors are created and perpetuated. It was interesting to see the explanation behind people’s gullibility and urge to gossip. As long as something is fairly plausible and it’s believable that the source (for example a vapid celebrity) would do the thing in question, we’re likely to think it is valid. In relation to celebrity blunders it’s because we want to know that they are flawed and more like us, not these fabulous specimens of perfection.
In the article the author debunked a few of the more commonly spread myths—I was glad to discover that we certainly do not swallow eight spiders a year in our sleep. Not that I fully believed it, but it’s comforting to know nonetheless. With that in mind, I thought I’d look up some of the other myths that have been going around and let you know which ones are true and which ones are not. There are a lot of myths out there so I had to narrow it down to a select few.
We’ve all swallowed pieces of gum in our lifetimes—on purpose or by accident. And I know when I was a bit younger, my friends used to say that it stays in your stomach for seven years before being digested. This is simply not true. Although gum is considered to be indigestible, once it has reached the stomach it is broken down just like any other food stuff we eat. Since gum isn’t technically food though, parents most likely told kids not swallow it and the kids came up with a false reason as to why they shouldn’t swallow it.
Have you heard about the idea that golf actually stands for “gentlemen only ladies forbidden”? If you have, then try and forget about it. It is considered that it came from one of the many Scottish pronunciations of the word goulf, which means “to strike or cuff”. Since linguists in North America prefer to have only one correct spelling for a word, we decided to go with golf and thus where we got the title from. Though I’m sure some men are comforted by the thought that golf is still a man’s game, despite the fact that just as many women play it now.
If any of you enjoy chocolate, I’d suggest skipping past this one. There’s a myth that says the average chocolate bar contains 8 insect legs. I did some thorough research on this and although I didn’t find that specific statistic, I did find something equally as gross. According to the U.S. Department of Health’s Maximum Defect Action Level chart, 4% of cocoa beans are moldy, 4% are insect-infested or insect damaged, 6% are insect infested or moldy (levels differ according to filth and mold presence), and there are 10mg or more of ‘mammalian excreta’ per pound. Yeah, I’m never eating chocolate again.
There are so many myths to go through that a thorough article would probably be somewhere around three or four hundred pages long. If you’re interested in learning about the true and false myths then you can go to snopes.com. Some of the things that are supposedly true will make you laugh your butt off. Most of them are interesting, but sometimes you just wish you didn’t know (like the chocolate). Happy mythbusting!
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