Ruth recently posted a comment on my post reporting the opinions of my doctors on my diet and exercise efforts.

. . . And fyi–here are signs of anorexia:

Do you feel fat even though people tell you you’re not?
Are you terrified of gaining weight?
Do you lie about how much you eat or hide your eating habits from others?
Are your friends or family concerned about your weight loss, eating habits, or appearance?
Do you diet, compulsively exercise, or purge when you’re feeling overwhelmed or bad about yourself?
Do you feel powerful or in control when you go without food, over-exercise, or purge?
Do you base your self-worth on your weight or body size?

I don’t feel personally that I am anorexic or at risk of becoming so. I like to eat too much. I am fully honest with my doctors about my weight and eating habits and while I may diet and exercise to make myself look better and for health benefits, I don’t diet to make myself feel better. If my diet and exercise started to affect my ability to care for my family or my doctors told me to gain a few pounds for health reasons, I would abandon my dieting immediately.

When I learned in The Fast Diet about an eating pattern called calorie restriction, wherein people purposely restrict their calories each day to a low amount and are very careful about what foods they eat (with supposedly great health benefits), I wondered how such an intense eating pattern was any different from anorexia.

I came across this interesting article on the subject by Melissa A. Fabello called, “Five Subtle Differences Between Diets and Anorexia.” It is written by someone who clearly has struggled with anorexia and gives us all a glimpse of what the anorexic mindset looks like.

Even after reading this article, it is still hard for me to draw a clear line between dieting and anorexia. The article points out a couple of behaviors that most people dieting won’t have but those with anorexia do:

• You don’t have a defined goal weight. There is no weight that can ever be thin enough.
• When you cheat on your diet you worry for days about it rather than feeling some guilt, resolving to do better next time and quickly moving on.
• You find that you can’t think about any subject without coming back to the subject of food and eating.
• Purging. Voluntarily causing yourself to vomit to avoid calorie intake or exercising to extremes to burn off every calorie consumed. (Vomiting is such an unpleasant feeling I can’t imagine ever wanting to do this as a dieting technique.)

One thing that stood out in my anorexia research is that there is no bright line quantitative rule for anorexia. For example, it is a rare situation where a healthy grown woman of average height would weigh less than 100 pounds or a healthy grown man of average height less than 150 pounds. Yet you will never find any definition of anorexia that is based solely on weight or body fat. This article points out that you could even be overweight and still have anorexia and that anorexia is best defined as a mental illness with a disordered perception of food.

Of course, if you suspect you have anorexia, you need to be under professional care. Ideally, you would start with your family doctor or consult a hotline like the one below.

• Help and Support Line for the National Eating Disorders Association

Thanks to Ruth for an insightful comment!

In my next post, continuing the theme of disordered eating with a look at how we are impacted by body images of celebrities.