Anorexia nervosa due to religious practice!

[Pritam]

An elderly woman with anorexia nervosa began restricting her diet when she was 13-years old while studying due to religious practice. She reports that, during the development of her disease, she had no mirrors and, rather than restricting her diet to be thin or attractive, she restricted her diet to be closer to God in hopes of becoming a Saint. How to cure this?

[Abhiroop]

@pritam Anorexia nervosa (AN) is a syndrome that is more prevalent among females than males and has a peak age of onset during adolescence. AN appears to have gained more popularity and professional attention over recent decades during a cultural period that idealizes thinness, with magazines publishing significantly more articles on methods for weight loss. Patients with AN are characterized by a disturbed body image in which they often have an intense preoccupation with weight, an intense fear of gaining weight despite having significantly low body weight, or persistent behavior that interferes with weight gain. While once considered a cultural-bound syndrome that occurs almost exclusively in western cultures, a recent review of eating disorders in a cross-cultural and historical context indicates that AN is not a cultural-bound syndrome, although certain features of the disorder appear to be culturally bound, such as fear of weight gain or of becoming fat. AN may take different forms in different cultural and historical contexts with one unifying theme of morbid self-starvation. While previously characterized as a disorder that only occurs in the western cultural idealization of thinness and pressures to lose weight, a review of the literature suggests a long-standing relation between self-starvation and religious asceticism