Most patients with bulimia nervosa can now be treated in out-patient settings with a combination of psychotherapy and medications, enabling them to continue work or school. The shame and embarrassment so many bulimics share can be put aside while they learn new behaviors and coping mechanisms. In this atmosphere, the urge to binge and purge is reduced by appropriate medical and psychiatric management. Anorexia nervosa is the formal name given to a condition in which patients, mostly women, seek to continually lower their body weights. They believe they look better as they become more and more depleted and wasted.
Anorexics have a distorted body image.
They think they are too fat, no matter what their weight is, and always want to become thinner. Anorexia nervosa is the most medically serious and least understood of all the eating disorders. Patients with anorexia nervosa often develop secondary changes in their endocrine system such as the absence of menstrual periods. Psychologists studying this condition have speculated that patients with anorexia nervosa want to return to a pre-pubertal state as a way of dealing with intense anxiety related to sexual development. Biological investigators have focused on abnormalities in the endocrine system, such as excessive cortisol production, abnormal regulation of water balance, abnormal thyroid function, elevated resting metabolic rate, and exaggerated responses to leptin as indications of the biological disturbance this condition causes.