Brilla is a seven-year-old child who is fixated with the models in the magazines. She started this fixation this last year. She has been eating paper. This was first noticed when the ends of the magazine were seen as torn off. Her mother has been trying to help her with her eating habits. She would refuse to eat anything nutritious in fear of putting on weight. Brilla’s biggest fear is putting on weight. Brilla’s mom was upset with the way how Brilla was behaving. She has been losing sleep over this issue.
Eating disorders in children and teens cause for serious concerns.
When we look at anorexia, this is where a child refuses to eat the necessary calories out of an irrational fear of becoming fat.
With bulimia, a child going through this condition, where there is overeating and then purges the food using various tactics like vomiting, laxatives to prevent the gaining of weight is a serious cause for concern with children.
Whereas with binge eating, the child going through this condition overeats food and doesn’t purge or take the food out. However, there are cases where children may suffer different aspects of these conditions. These conditions typically happen in teenage years. However, there is research that shows that this condition can start early in childhood as well. It is important to note that female children are more vulnerable to this condition.
5% to 15% of people with anorexia and bulimia are males, whereas with binge eating the rates are 35%. Males are more prone to binge eating. Some issues that could be leading to these eating disorders are:
· Fear of being over weight
· Feeling of helplessness and
· Low self esteem
· When the child has been bullied in school
These are a few of the reasons that can lead to extreme forms of eating disorders.
Anorexia can lead to several health problems:
For some people there could be major organs that can get damaged.
There could be Irregular heartbeat, lowered blood pressure.
Sensitivity to cold, thinning of bones, teeth gets affected and the individual can easily be susceptible to colds and ill health.
Treatment:
The aim of this treatment is to get the person back to their normal weight. Hospitalization may be necessary if the individual doesn’t recover from the treatment.
Other possible treatment modes are Psychotherapy, behaviour therapy, and antidepressants.
Bulimia in children and teens:
This condition leads the child to constant fear of putting on weight and also a dark feeling of unhappiness with the way their bodies looks like.
There is a sense of loss of control. They will also feel a shame or disgust when purging happens. They will use various methods to get the food out of their system. It is daunting to see that 1 out of 15 females go through bulimia.
The anxieties that this condition causes are:
· Binging on large amounts of food
· Eating in secret and hiding food is a common feature.
· Regularly running to the bathroom to relieve themselves
· Over emphasis on body image
· Damage to the tooth enamel
· Inflammation of the esophagus
· Swelling of salivary gland due to repeated vomiting
Bulimia can also lower potassium which is detrimental to health.
Treatment
Breaking of the eating purging cycle is important. This can be helped with some amount of psychoeducation and use of therapeutic models of counselling like CBT, family therapy, nutritional counselling.
Binge eating
This condition is similar to bulimia however the whole aspect of purging is not there. Therefore, the child puts on a lot of weight. They struggle with emotions of anger, worry, stress or boredom which makes them turn to food as a comfort food. There will be signs of depression for these individuals. Here counselling care is important as they will be dealing with emotions that are hard to process.
The excess weight causes a lot of complications:
Heart disease, high blood pressure, cholesterol, PCOD in women are just a few of the complications that could occur with this condition.
Treatment includes:
Behavioural therapy deals with what is causing this behaviour, what could be causing this behaviour. Here the importance of medications cannot be understated. Different forms of psychotherapy are also available to help the individual deal with this kind of difficulty.
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