The eating disorder referred to as anorexia can be described as a continuous eating disorder caused by a loss of appetite. Nonetheless, there is more to it than that. Anorexia Nervosa includes retaining a false body image wherein you might consider you might have weight to lose whereas in reality, you might already be underweight.

Included in the definition of Anorexia should also be a few of the symptoms related to the disorder. These symptoms include not eating enough calories in order to maintain your body’s health; exercising to the point of burning excessive amounts of calories that you might have eaten; and being unable to eat more even though your health might at times depend on it.

Evidently, anorexia nervosa and bulimia sometimes run together quite closely. However, these need to be identified as separate disorders which should be treated separately.

The definition of anorexia definitely includes people who are so extremely thin, that they often encounter health problems, yet they continue to diet and count calories. At times, anorexics diet until they fall ill as their bodies are no longer able to maintain life with the too little amount of calories that they take in.

Taking into account the small amount of calories they take in, anorexics often have many underlying health issues such as poor heart, kidney failure and liver failure. This is why it is important that you remain aware that your body should be properly nourished and that someone with anorexia will find it difficult to do this for themselves, regardless of their health issues.

When an anorexic chooses to diet, they sometimes have a distorted sense of what they should be eating, and what they will need to look like. They usually tend to diet until their health problems increase, till their situation becomes critical.

Altogether, the definition of Anorexia should definitely include some of the signs which are related to anorexia. These signs include a self-esteem based on the amount of weight the person might have lost or gained; and the idea that becoming thin is all that matters despite one’s physical health; an unhealthy obsession with calories and fat grams; pretending to eat; lying about whether or not you eat; and strange food habits or rituals.

If you know someone like this, you should definitely try to get them some assistance.  Unless they get appropriate help, anorexics can sometimes die from their disorder because their body will eventually give up waiting for nutrition.

An anorexic should always bear in mind that as long as you underfeed their body, the body systems will continue to run negatively. Nevertheless, they can only run for so long, and, eventually, even the body won’t have sufficient levels of fat, muscle or tissue in order to be able to remain alive when the body consumes food. Very often, treatment will be necessary for life.

Georgia Kearne is a contributing editor at FitnessHealthArticles.com. This article may be reproduced provided that its complete content, links and author byline are kept intact and unchanged. No additional links permitted. Hyperlinks and/or URLs must remain both human clickable and search engine spiderable.