We all know about anorexia and bulimia. Those are problems that have long been documented and that the health community — more or less — knows how to define and treat.
But untold people out there clearly have issues with food that aren’t so easily labeled. Take the case of Abby Ellin, author of Teenage Waistland: A Former Fat Kid Weighs in on Living Large, Losing Weight and How Parents Can (and Can’t) Help. As a young adult who’d spent years attending summer fat camps, she strictly monitored her calorie intake one day only to go crazy eating whatever she wanted the next.
The Ednos problem
People with problems like Ellin’s these days are usually diagnosed as having Ednos, an acronym for eating disorder not otherwise specified. Meaning there’s clearly something wrong but it doesn’t fit into the standard definitions of what an eating disorder looks like.
Ednos is so common it’s now diagnosed more often than anorexia or bulimia, with about 4 percent of American women been labeled with the disorder every year. Some of the disorders that fall under Ednos include:
- binge eating without purging
- picky eating
- chewing food but spitting it out before swallowing
- night eating
- compulsive exercising
- orthorexia
As you can imagine, many in the medical community think that Ednos is much too big and vague a category. For one thing, there’s no way you’d treat a picky eater in the same way you’d treat someone who binges frequently. Labeling someone as Ednos doesn’t really help them understand the problem and doesn’t provide a certain solution to their particular issue.
The definition of Ednos is set to be revised in the 2013 edition of the Diagnostic and Statistical Manual of Mental Disorders, perhaps with some of the subsets of the disorder given their own definitions.
Not good enough for a real disorder
The label of Ednos sometimes gets people thinking that they’re not good enough to have a “real” eating disorder and that they need to try harder to lose more weight to get a more definite diagnosis. Many people with Ednos are normal weight or even a little overweight, so they might not seek treatment as quickly as someone with a more easily recognizable disorder.
Another problem is that insurance often doesn’t pay for treatments related to Ednos, while it might pay for anorexia or bulimia treatments.
(By Sarah E. White for CalorieLab Calorie Counter News)
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How to help people with non-textbook eating disorders?