• Many anorexics suffer from amenorrhoea, low blood pressure, cold hands and feet, downy hair growth on the face, arms and back, and their weight drops to as little as 50 per cent of the average for their age. However, these symptoms can signal other problems, too, so consult your doctor for diagnosis.

• Is anorexia nervosa the result of pressure from fashion magazines that to be beautiful you must be thin? To some extent it is, since the desire to conform is part of the onset of the disease. More important is fear which makes women attempt to starve away their secondary sexual characteristics, thus releasing them from the need to succeed in the sexual field.

• Anorexia is not a disease you catch from too much dieting. It is a disease resulting from psychological problems which may have evolved over a long period. Because of this, attacking eating problems will not cure anorexia. And it is not a modern disease: its incidence is documented in the 17th century.

• Anorexia nervosa is not just a teenage problem. Although it is most common among pubescent teenagers who become as easily obsessed by dieting as by pop music, it is a disturbed mental and emotional state (as at the trauma of puberty or a death), not a hormonal one, which produces anorexia. So it can happen at any age.

• Anorexics often have distorted images of their own bodies. They often imagine themselves to be much fatter than they are, and have similar distorted views of their own personalities.

• Most anorexics do not actually want to die although the incidence of death is high as result of starvation and more importantly prolonged damage to digestive organs, particularly the kidneys and pancreas. The incidence of suicide in longstanding anorexics is 5 per cent. They want to gain love and attention from parents and siblings, to change unhappy situations which may have been with them since childhood.

Coping With Anorexia Anorexia nervosa requires medical help. Tradition treatments such as force-feeding, withdrawal privileges until the patient eats and puts on weigh rebuilding of dietary habits while in hospital an even psychotherapy and family therapy have not always been successful.