What happens to the body when a person has an eating disorder?
A lot of the psychological features we associate with anorexia nervosa are actually secondary to the malnutrition. People tend to get more obsessive, more anxious, their cognitive functioning often gets a little, you know, people don’t think abstractly, they get more concrete. Medically, their bodies actually start to shut down: their brain shrinks, their bone stop or their body stops developing bone mass, which is a big risk factor for osteoporosis late in life. As one gets thinner and thinner, people start to get cold at the extreme, and they’ll start to grow body hair. What are the long-term risks of an eating disorder? They are significant. So certainly, osteoporosis is an issue, fertility is an issue, the risk of people staying sick and really having this be a big part of their lives for a long time is another risk; that’s sort of harder to define or quantify. But the eating disorder becomes a chronic condition, it really starts to influence all aspects of people’s lives: their re
