The question that my children ask me, adamantly, watching TV, hard-pressed with full advertising of false messages that recommend hyper caloric food and drinks, all lay down in calm background spiced with the company of attractive and skinny models who follow a risk diet surrounded with handsome guys pumped with steroids, all muscles and no brain is "Mom would you buy for me?". Surely, all this contributes, not only to the increasing of our children obesity, influencing them to assume unhealthy eating habits, but also producing the eating disorders generating in our children a distorted and unhealthy image of the body beauty. Among many diseases caused by the eating disorders, the “Anorexia” today is in increasingly worried. What’s the “Anorexia”? It’s loss appetite; it’s the iron will to refuse the food. According to the statistics, the Anorexia is a disease that affect the female sex in 95% of the cases and is verified a genetic predisposition.
The causes: The provoking factors can be: risk diet; a stress situation (the girl psychologically is a weak and uncertain person); parent’s separation; mourning in family; first sexual experiences; loss of self-esteem. It’s a basic importance also the pubertal change (sexual maturation) that often for the girl becomes a trauma.
The symptoms: weight loss until 30% of her initial weight; fear to fatten also being skinny; interruption of the menstrual cycle from at least 3 months.
How we can help them?
If the cures at home are not sufficient, is necessary an recovering in an ambulatory or hospitals structures, where the girl is supervised by professional equipe composed by: Endocrinologists, psychiatrics, child neuropsychiatric, nutritionists and dietists. During the recovering the girl is controlled by the following exams: ECG (electrocardiogram) to check of the operation of the heart; blood exams to monitor the girl’s anemia; meeting with the psychiatric to obtain the data on the life history of the girl talking with and without her parents; alternative feedings when the girl is in bad nutritional conditions, or when her refuse persists in the food causing the heart troubles, is necessary intravenous feeding or a nose gastric tube.
What’s the rescue?
The equipe must have like final goal the “Triumph”, giving her spurring taking care of herself and when she comes back home, making her to rediscover the pleasures of life included those for the food and to seek the help of qualified persons who can conduct her by lending a hand and leading her beyond the distressed channel.