Online Dietetic Consultations for Eating Disorders

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Disordered Eating is not the same as an eating disorder. People with disordered eating can be either a healthy weight or overweight and despite trying many different diets and know a lot about healthy eating can still struggle to maintain a balanced diet. 

If you have disordered eating, you may feel guilt and shame when you eat certain foods. You may feel anxiety when you’re faced with an invitation to go to dinner or a special occasion involving food. You may feel that you are driven to compulsive eating which feels uncontrollable. You may sometimes eat compulsively in large volumes. You may also notice that you rarely eat because you’re hungry but mostly for emotional reasons. 

Disordered eating can mean that you are expending a large amount of your mental energy on thinking about food and your body while still struggling to maintain a healthy diet.

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Eating disorders are diagnosed by a psychiatrist or doctor and can be very different from one person to the next. Ranging from disordered eating thoughts to binge eating, here is a short summary of some of them:

• Anorexia Nervosa is the most commonly known eating disorder. Restrictive eating, weight loss and excess exercise can be some of the symptoms. Typically you want to lose more and more weight.
   

• Bulimia nervosa is when someone has binges where they feel out of control and eat large amounts in one go, then they may purge (vomit, use laxative or diuretics) afterwards. 
   

• Binge eating disorder is when you regularly have binges but do not make yourself sick afterwards.
   

• Orthorexia can be when you aim to eat healthily but this spirals out of control, with more and more food rules and restricting more food groups.

There can also be a mix of multiple disorders, so you may not fit into any of these categories. Whilst knowing what is wrong can feel helpful, the most important thing is to reach out and get help. The quicker you start working on recovery the better.