Anorexia, Bulimia, Binge eating... how to beat Eating Disorders?

By Cristiano Antonino On Mar 27, 2023

Eating disorders as signs of discomfort: disorders related to food intake are an important sign of discomfort, both when they appear occasionally – stomach ache, nausea, morning vomiting – and even more so when the disorders are constant or frequent or more severe, such as disharmonies in food intake such as anorexia or bulimia and binge eating

When placed in the adolescent phase, eating disorders have specific connotations related mainly to body experience and image, identity, relationships.

Eating disorders: Food, the body, love

Besides satisfying a primary need directed at survival, food is a pleasure: sensory, olfactory, visual, gustatory, tactile, relational.

From the moment of birth, it represents for the ‘person-child’ physical nourishment but also nourishment of ‘care’ and love.

And so it remains throughout life.

Proof of this is the fact that we eat lunch willingly with friendly people, while with hostile people we ‘close our stomachs’; a meal in which an affectionate atmosphere is breathed in is appreciated, while a cold or tense atmosphere can ‘spoil’ any good dish.

Relationships are expressed through food: food is a mediator of relationships, from infancy to late adulthood. That is why at any age food blackmail can be present.

Food influences the body, changing its dimensions. “Eat, so you grow!”, however, turns into “I eat, so I get fat” for the adolescent. Why is this particularly the case in adolescence?

In the course of puberty, due to the effect of hormones, the body changes proportions; in females, new roundness (breasts, hips) develops, which is experienced with ambivalence by adolescents, both in relation to specific social aesthetic models and dictates, and because these changes are visible and the subject of comments and comparisons in the peer group.

The adolescent is thus in crisis with her body, sometimes with food, often with her parents (more or less explicitly).

And so the mother’s attention on food, the invitations to eat (the mother cries, the father shouts) are not accepted; out of defiance, to experiment one’s autonomy, to oppose.

The adolescent’s anxiety collides and adds to the parents’ anxiety, which manifests itself in aggressive or depressive ways.

It can thus happen that on the physiological unease, which can be overcome in a limited period, a pathological unease is grafted on.

In addition to social models, the personality structure of the adolescent, the type of family relationships, and the mother figure are all involved.

After a period of innocent dieting, a constant pathology is thus triggered, which requires the subject to expend considerable energy and sometimes complicates with other problems.

The exhibited body and Eating Disorders

All epochs have had their own ways of exhibiting the body.

Today’s typicalities relate to:

The importance of the body and beauty, the main goal in the lives of men and women: for the former through care of muscles, depilation…; for the latter through make-up, clothing and – in adulthood – the fight against age. Sometimes it is the parents themselves who reinforce these elements in their sons and daughters.
The importance of thinness. Advertising stars, models, showbiz personalities present aesthetic models that are often unattainable for most people; the chubby person is unfashionable and also proves incapable of making their body what they want it to be.
The importance of the peer group. The pressure of the peer group, both in the flesh and on social networks, combined with the inability to make autonomous decisions, makes the adolescent more and more a prisoner of social models, based on appearance and exteriority. And at the same time increasingly suffering from their own mismatch with the proposed ideals.
Clothing. It amplifies physical characteristics. It is experienced as an amplification of the self and as a condition for being accepted by the peer group.
We can observe that parents themselves are sometimes slaves to these stereotypes: we see very small girls with artificially bleached hair, three-year-old boys dressed like miniature adults.

It should be added, however, that we should be concerned when we observe that such overestimation and over-adaptation are combined with low self-esteem, perfectionism, intolerance of emotions, interpersonal problems.

How to do prevention

In the age of development, the family and the school are the fundamental pillars,

In the family, it is important, indeed essential, for parental figures to accept that loving and being loved does not mean agreeing on all the things in life; to be willing, therefore, to reflect on one’s own educational style, one’s own value system, one’s relational methods with sons and daughters, the relationship between the couple, which is often subterraneously conflictual and which the disturbance of the child* forces out into the open.
Teachers have the great advantage of being able to get to know (at least a little) the thoughts and observe the behaviour of their students; and also of being able to ‘work’ with them on these critical nuclei:
knowledge about healthy eating
attitudes regarding body image
the expression of emotions, and at the same time appropriately restrained
the improvement of eating habits
relationships in the peer group – peers that is – which includes both boys and girls.

When the eating problem emerges, networking is crucial.

For parents, being able to put aside the fear of confrontation and judgement, feelings of inadequacy in having to ask for help, and the shame of one’s own presumed failure as an educator are essential elements for building collaborative relationships without competitiveness.

Eating Disoders, therapy

It is long and demanding, but indispensable in the case of overt disorders.

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On the basis of therapeutic successes, there is an increasing trend towards integrated therapy: psychologist-psychotherapist, doctor-dietologist, dietician, endocrinologist, psychiatrist, intervene in a coordinated and collaborative manner, each in their own field: both the physical body and the psychic body (body image) must be ‘restructured’.

The combination of a male and a female therapist is very effective.

In therapy, or in some phases of it, the family is involved; it is almost always necessary for each of the family members to be willing to change: the eating disorder is in fact a dramatic and peremptory call for change.

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