Eating Disorder Definition May Change To Be More Specific

The NY Times ran an article recently examining the clinical diagnosis of Ednos, the most commonly diagnosed eating disorder.

According to the National Eating Disorders Association, around 4 percent of American women are diagnosed with Ednos each year. Ednos (Eating Disorder Not Otherwise Specified) encompasses disordered eating behaviors such as binge eating disorder, night eating, binge/restrict cycles, eliminating food groups, or any combination of the patients own rules and limitations they put on their diet.

The discussion is narrowing the definition of the disorder, which as of now, encompasses every disordered eating behavior that cannot be classified as anorexia or bulimia.

A common misconception is that eating disorders are all about starving yourself of every calorie you can, either by not eating at all (anorexic) or by eating everything in sight, and then purging every calorie you consumed from your body through vomiting or exercise (bulimia.) This is not the case. Eating disorders are controlling or manipulating your food in any manner that negatively effects your health (physically and/or mentally) and negatively impacts and interferes with your daily life.

Giving the disorder a name, no matter how vague, helps many women see that they do, in fact, have a problem. Many feel they are not “sick enough” to seek help, either because they do not engage in disordered behaviors all the time, or they are simply not thin/fat enough to be physically in danger, or what the public thinks an eating disorder patient should look like.

Notice there are no weight limitations or concrete numbers that indicate an eating disorder, even with anorexia and bulimia. As someone that was diagnosed with bulimia in high school, went through treatment, and has since become a health and fitness trainer and writer, I am quite familiar with the blurry lines of disordered eating behaviors. Recovery was actually the hardest time because I didn’t know what was a positive or negative behavior. If I ate a cookie, was I giving into my eating disorder? Or was I being normal, and not being so strict with my food that I was allowing myself an indulgence? If I didn’t eat it, was I restricting? Or just being healthy, and not wanting to eat an unhealthy food? Eventually, I realized that it wasn’t necessarily the behavior, it was my attitude. Did I feel guilty after I ate the cookie? Was I setting myself up for a binge and relapse? Was it because I was irrationally scared to gain weight?

Because it is a frame of mind, it is a hard diagnosis. Anorexics starve. Bulimics purge. If you do not purge, you are not bulimic. Ednos is more in your head. For example:

Two women want to lose weight. They start eating right, lower their calories to 1600 a day, and workout six days a week. One is living a normal healthy lifestyle and the other could be diagnosed with Ednos.

Why?

The Ednos patient can’t think of anything besides her next meal. She obsesses over those calories, constantly counting and recounting her total. She won’t eat more than 300 calories in one sitting. She does her workouts in a specific order, and must burn a certain amount of calories before she leaves. She gets annoyed, or even angry, when she can’t go to the gym when she plans on it, or someone unexpectedly invites her out to dinner, because they are messing with her diet. She gets anxious.

The actions are the same, but it’s the obsession and control that are the issues.

Being in the fitness industry, I see this often. Some are clients, and some are trainers themselves; and many have the misconception that since their fixation is with “healthy” foods, and eating “healthy” that it isn’t dangerous, and that it isn’t a problem.

Food is food. It is fuel for a bodies to be able to do the things they need to do. It is not anything to obsess over, fixate on, control, or manipulate to make yourself feel strong or in control. If you feel like you do any of these things, click here to find out more about Ednos, and its symptoms, and where you can go to get help.