Eating disorders – some home truths

While much about eating disorders remains a mystery, there are some things that can be taken as fact:

• While modern eating disorders seem to be more resistant to help and last longer, they have been documented in previous centuries.
  
  
• While diets don’t seem to cause eating disorders, there does seem to be a link between those that diet to extremes and those that do not. Women who obsessively diet are eighteen times more likely to develop an eating disorder, while those that diet moderately only are five times as likely.
  
  
• It seems that diagnosed severe mental disorders can increase the risk of eating disorders by a factor of seven. Those with depression and obsessive compulsive disorders seem to be most at risk.