Jordyn: Hi! My name is Jordyn, and I am from Williamsburg, Virginia, and my girlfriend is really skinny, but I see her eat all the time. So I was wondering how many pounds below weight does someone have to be to actually be considered anorexic?
Dr. Jill Kindy: Jordyn, one of the things with eating disorders is that in your gut do you feel like she is healthy or not healthy. And if you've got that sort of feeling in your gut that something is not right then it might be an eating disorder.
Eating disorders typically aren't just diagnosed based on weight or whether the person is underweight, there are other factors involved which include preoccupation with food, restrictive eating patterns, or extreme eating patterns, and it's a mental health disorder.
Now, if she is underweight just based on her genetics and that's just kind of the size and shape that she is, then that's okay.
As for being underweight the diagnosis for eating disorder is we look at their 15% under their ideal body weight, and an example of that would be someone whose ideal bodyweight is 125 pounds then considered really underweight, their anorexic would be 106 pounds or less.
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