Revealed: The surprisingly most common eating disorders in Cairns

A Cairns clinic has experienced a spike in eating disorders from people aged between 45 and 52, as a woman speaks out about the disease that “slowly” killed her.

For all the different types of eating disorders, low self-worth and a belief that a certain diet will fix their emotional problems are at the core of the problem says an eating disorder expert.

A Cairns clinic has experienced a spike in eating disorders from people aged between 45 and 52, as a woman speaks out about the disease that “slowly” killed her.

Laura Smith, Consultant Psychiatrist, North Queensland Eating Disorder Service said atypical anorexia and binge-eating disorder, only recognised in 2013, had become the most common eating disorders in Cairns.

“People tend to think anorexia and bullimia when you say eating disorder, but actually it’s not the case ... often people with eating disorders have normal looking bodies or are overweight,” Dr Smith said.

Binge-eating disorder is a disorder in which you frequently consume unusually large amounts of food and feel unable to stop eating.

Laura Smith and Davina Nevin from North Queensland Eating Disorder Service.

Atypical anorexia is when an individual meets all of the criteria for anorexia nervosa except that despite significant weight loss, the individual’s weight is within or above the normal range.

Dr Smith said body mass index could be a “fairly crude measure” of healthy weight and says it does not always paint the full picture.

Another of the most common disorders is eating disorder unspecified. This applies to behaviours causing distress or impairment, but do not meet the full criteria of any of the feeding or eating disorder criteria like anorexia.

A woman had to be feed through a tube in hospital said that 'control' is at the root of her eating disorder.

A patient from the clinic diagnosed with eating disorder unspecified said it was “slowly killing her”, and about control over food rather than fear of it.

She has recently got out of hospital where she had to be fed with a tube.

The woman said she wouldn’t consume carbohydrates, sugar, fruits, soy, vegan or gluten.

“I missed out of 20 years of every holiday you can imagine, I didn’t celebrate Christmas and rarely went out with friends because the event was often centred around food,” she said.

Along with her rigid dieting, she took an extreme approach to over-exercising which has left her with an over-stretched heart which she is not sure she will recover from.

“I had trouble in my home growing up. I started making excuses to go out for biking or netball, and I got praised for that. It gave me validation I wasn’t getting at home. So when I was offered certain foods I would say ‘no’ I am training. I wanna be the best. The food discipline became about controlling my environment because I couldn’t control what else was going on at home.”

Davina Nevin Clinical Nurse Consultant, North Queensland Eating Disorder Service said that for all the different types of eating disorders, low self-worth and a belief that a certain diet would fix their emotional problems were at the core of the problem.

The woman says she never went out with friends if they invited her out for a burger or ice-cream, and didn’t celebrate Christmas for 20 years to avoid certain foods.

“We always working towards normalising including self-esteem. But almost every eating disorder starts with diets — with some kind of food restriction. Not everyone who diets has an eating disorder but everyone has an eating disorder started out with diets. Make sure you get professional advice before dieting.”

It comes as Queensland has seen a disturbing 400 per cent increase in eating disorder hospitalisations since the introduction of social media more than 20 years ago, according to new health data.

The woman says she is not surprised at the link to social media and eating disorders.

She said Instagram in particular was problematic in the way “people take the best moments of their life and make it looks like it’s their life, every moment of every day”.

Originally published as Revealed: The surprisingly most common eating disorders in Cairns