"there is no sincerer love than the love of food"

In Psychiatry, there are elements of various psychiatric presentations in many patients.  I have seen a few who have eating disorders.  The criteria is various, and this is the ICD-10 criteria.  These criteria are one version that psychiatrists use (as well as DSM-IV.  These will be updated soon to ICD-11 and DSM-V)

For a definite diagnosis, all the following are required:

1. Body weight is maintained at least 15% below that expected (either lost or never achieved), or Quetelet's body-mass index is 17.5 or less. Prepubertal patients may show failure to make the expected weight gain during the period of growth.
2. The weight loss is self-induced by avoidance of "fattening foods" and one or more of the following: self-induced vomiting; self-induced purging; excessive exercise; use of appetite suppressants and/or diuretics.
3. There is body-image distortion in the form of a specific psychopathology whereby a dread of fatness persists as an intrusive, overvalued idea and the patient imposes a low weight threshold on himself or herself.
4. A widespread endocrine disorder involving the hypothalamic-pituitary-gonadal axis is manifest in women as amenorrhoea and in men as a loss of sexual interest and potency. (An apparent exception is the persistence of vaginal bleeds in anorexic women who are receiving replacement hormonal therapy, most commonly taken as a contraceptive pill.) There may also be elevated levels of growth hormone, raised levels of cortisol, changes in the peripheral metabolism of the thyroid hormone, and abnormalities of insulin secretion.
5. If onset is prepubertal, the sequence of pubertal events is delayed or even arrested (growth ceases; in girls the breasts do not develop and there is a primary amenorrhoea; in boys the genitals remain juvenile). With recovery, puberty is often completed normally, but the menarche is late.

I got these from http://counsellingresource.com/distress/eating-disorders/anorexia.html, via google, so apologies if they are not correct.

It's a bit harrowing.  I have had preoccupations with food in the past, and I took the Eating Attitudes Test.  I originally found it via the wikipedia article for anorexia nervosa a few weeks ago, but I could not find the link for it on this page, but this link has the same questions.


My score worried me slightly :(


Carol


(quote by George Bernard Shaw)