Be on the lookout for:
- Constant thoughts of food
- Counting calories
- Weighing several times a day
- Complaining about being fat or about specific body parts
- Severely limiting food intake
- Labeling certain foods as “good” or “bad”
- Obsessive Exercising to the extreme to burn calories
- Exercising as a punishment for eating a “bad” food
- Vomiting after eating
- Severe anxiety
- Using laxatives, diet pills, enemas, diuretics, and or ipecac
- Hiding foods
- Exhibiting food rituals (such as cutting food into tiny pieces)
- Frequent or often long trips to the bathroom, often with water running
- Avoiding people, lying, keeping secrets, stealing, cutting or compulsively shopping
- Perfectionism
- Reading books or visiting websites on eating disorders and dieting
- Considerably thinner in a relatively short period of time with no explainable reason, such as a medical cause
- Swollen neck with enlarged salivary glands resulting from excessive vomiting.
- Lying and secretive behavior
- Absence of menstrual cycles (in younger ages, 3 cycles may be rather late in the game to intervene)
- Maintaining a body weight of 15% below normal for age, height, and body type
- Dressing to hide body shape
- Avoiding meals
- Dental Problems
- Brittle Nails & Hair
* Studies have shown that anorexia and bulimia have a hereditary factor of 50-80%. It is important to address one’s “family history” of an eating disorder and be especially mindful of this factor.
