NOTE: Not everyone will display all signs
Behavioural Signs
With Food
- Repeatedly avoiding meals (saying “I’ll eat later”, “ I ate with friends”)
- Refuse to eat with the family or in front of people
- Reduction in amount and types of food eaten
- Not wanting to eat what everyone else is having
- Lie to family and friends about how much they have eaten
- Become very deceptive around food and eating – ie. they may eat a normal size dinner with the family but this could be all they have eaten that day
- Eating meals but extremely restless or guilty after the meal as their anxiety grows
- Pre-occupation with food and feeding others (counting calories, reading recipes)
- Unusual eating habits (eg. preference for foods of a certain texture or colour, eating with a teaspoon, adding lots of condiments)
- Compulsively arranging food and/or cutting into tiny pieces
- Very rigid around food – only eating particular types of food or at certain times.
- Eating unusual mixtures of food
- Denying hunger
- Dieting when not overweight
Other
- Frequent weighing
- Talking about new diets and expressing the desire to be thinner
- Increasing isolation, disinterest in social activities, work and /or study
- Social Withdrawal and intolerance of others
- Excessive exercising
- Wearing baggy clothes
- Deny being ill
Emotions & Thoughts
- Distorted body image: believes they are fat even when very thin
- General dissatisfaction with appearance and figure. Expressing the desire to change
- Extreme concern about appearance, both physical and behavioural
- Thinking in extremes (If I’m not thin, I’ll be grossly obese)
- General apathy and/or depressive outlook on life
- Moodiness, irritability, depression, argumentative – especially around meal times
- Inflexibility
- Oversensitive to criticism
- Feel very guilty about eating
- Have black and white thinking about food. ie good food & bad food
- Have low self esteem
- Have a need for perfection
- Have periods of depression
Physical
Signs of Starvation / Malnutrition / Underweight
- Significant weight loss in the absence of a related illness. However, not always – with young people it may be the case that they just don’t grow and put on weight
- Thinning of Hair or hair loss
- Appearance of fine raised white hair (lanugo) on the body
- Bloated appearance of stomach
- Yellowish appearance of the palms or soles of feet
- Dry, pale, pasty Skin
- Loss of periods (amenorrhea) or irregular periods
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