Anorexia Nervosa Causes a Girl’s Organs to Start Shutting Down; How Does the Eating Disorder Affect One’s Physical, Mental Health?

A teenager from West Kirkby in Wirral was suffering from an eating disorder called anorexia that left her scared to drink water and refuse to eat.

According to a Liverpool Echo report, Nina White was only 16-year-old when she was told her organs were beginning to shut down. However, after four years of not eating any food and having to be fed through a tube, she started on her journey to recovery.

Now at age 21, Nina has bravely shared her story to give hope to others in the same situations. The then-teenager began to suffer from the said eating disorder when she was 14 years old.

She told this media outlet she'd say growing up, she was a little self-conscious of how she looked. She added, she began to struggle with body image and self-confidence when she was about eight or nine years old.

Nina said she did get bullied when she was at primary school, which perhaps contributed to how she felt about her body, although at that point, her eating and everything was fine. She continued to eat normally when she was young; it was only certainly how she felt about herself.

Then, at age 11, Nina engaged in an incident where she choked quite badly, and after that, she developed a bit of a fear that each time she ate, she would choke or die.

Anorexia Eating Disorder

Eating Disorders Online describes anorexia as the "shorthand name for anorexia nervosa," an eating disorder affecting millions of people all over the world.

Even though anorexia is on the rise across the United States, most people stay unaware of the specific impacts of the eating disorder.

In an ardent aim to lose weight, people suffering from anorexia nervosa frequently use a wide range of unhealthy calorie restriction methods, including consistent undereating, fasting, over-exercising, and post-meal purging.

Since they employ such serious food deprivation techniques, individuals with this condition have a high risk of dangerous weight loss and severe malnourishment.

Psychological Effect

Unfortunately, the effects of anorexia nervosa are not just purely physical problems. The foremost psychological impacts of this eating disorder also include obsessive and distorted perception about the ideal shape of the body and strong and unreasonable fear of gaining weight.

In the case of Nina, a separate report from Liverpool Echo specified that she spent five years in and out of the hospital. During that time, she was "detained under the Mental Health Act" and spent one year 230 miles away from home at a Glasgow-based specialist hospital, the only hospital bed available for her.

In 2017, during a hospital admission, Nina said she was asked to do a squat by her doctors as part of a series of tests. When she tried to squat her body weight, she said she literally "just fell to the floor." she continued, she couldn't even squat her body weight. Doctors were telling her that her organs were beginning to shut down, and if she'd stayed home, she could have died then, basically.

Related information about anorexia nervosa is shown on Medical Centric's YouTube video below:

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