Anorexia
Anorexia: It is a disease
Imagine never eating and pretending like you are not hungry. First it may seem awesome and you might want to do it all the time. But then hair starts growing in places it shouldn't, your skin becomes dry, scaly, and yellowish and you become so depressed that you don't even have a "social" life anymore. Anorexia will do all of this and more to whomever it takes over. Anorexia is a major disease.
Everyone knows that anorexia is an eating disorder, but what they do not know is that it is really a major disease that can kill you. According to Jacqueline Longe anorexia was classified as a psychiatric disorder in 1980 in the 3rd edition of DSM. Characteristics of anorexia are unrealistic fear of gaining weight, self-starvation, and conspicuous distortion of their body image. Anorexia comes from two Latin words that mean "nervous inability to eat" (Longe). There are also two subtypes of anorexia. The first subtype is called the restricting type. This type means that the anorexic person has a strict diet and exercises way too much. Binge eating and purging is the second subtype of anorexia. Experiencing episodes of compulsive eating with or without self-induced vomiting and the use of laxatives or enemas is the characteristics of the second type (Longe).
When we think of an anorexic we think of an impossibly thin young girl, obsessively toying with her food but never eating it, and the details of her skeleton are clearly visible through her dry flesh. David Sifton has said that eating disorders is one of the most stubborn problems a person can face. Most of the time we can not tell if someone has this horrible problem. By the time we actually find out that the person does have anorexia it is almost too late. At this point they now have serious health problems such as malnutrition, dehydration, esophagus tears, kidney and liver damage, and could eventually turn into death (Hughes 72). The National...
Please login to view the full essay...