Types of Eating Disorders
Eating disorders are divided into several known disorders:
- Anorexia Nervosa (AN) – characterized by being underweight and refusal to maintain normal weight, fear of gaining weight, severe body image disorder, or excessive influence of weight and external appearance on self-esteem and denial of the severity of the illness. Today, there is an increase in the number of patients suffering from an Anorexia Nervosa subcategory, Atypical Anorexia Nervosa. In this eating disorder, the patient does not reach extreme underweight, the weight is normal despite weight loss, and all other characteristics of AN.
- Bulimia Nervosa – characterized by repeated episodes of binge eating attacks done with a sense of lack of control, compensating behaviors such as vomiting or using laxatives to avoid weight gain, overinfluence of weight and external appearance on self-esteem; weight is usually normal.
- Binge Eating Disorder (BED)- characterized by repeated episodes of binging, eating a very large amount of food, feeling out of control, behavioral symptoms of lack of control, great distress in relation to binging, without compensational behaviors (the weight is usually higher than expected per height).
- Avoidant Restrictive Eating Disorder (ARFID) – an eating disorder that is not related to body image or weight but is characterized by distaste for many foods due to texture, smell, shape, taste. Those who deal with this eating disorder consume few types of foods and place significant restrictions on the amount of eating.
In all disorders, there is an increased preoccupation with food, eating or not eating. Although sometimes there may seem to be significant differences between the various types of disorders, in fact many patients range from different disorders throughout their lives and the similarity seems to outweigh the difference.
