Eating disorders affect up to 24 million people in the United States. Currently, only 35 percent of them are in treatment. The number is astonishing, given that eating disorders have a higher mortality rate than any other mental illness, including depression. Anorexia nervosa, bulimia nervosa and binge eating disorder are not limited to teenage girls. They take over the lives of women, boys and men, too.Anorexia nervosa is defined as being 15 percent or more below ideal body weight. Excessive weight loss, accompanied by a terrible fear of being fat and an obsessive need to control weight are its hallmarks. Anorexics have a distorted body image and think they are fat even when they have clearly become malnourished. Abnormal behaviors include compartmentalizing and rationing food, compulsive exercising and continual dieting. Physical symptoms manifest with emaciation, hair loss and missed periods. In extreme cases, organ failure, abnormal heart rhythms and death can result.Unlike anorexia, bulimia nervosa can affect people of any size and shape. Bulimics follow an endless loop of binging compulsively, then purging as punishment for the binge. A typical behavior is to consume a huge meal of more than a thousand calories, then trigger the purge by vomiting or consuming laxatives. Because the behavior is self-destructive, feelings of guilt force bulimics into a cycle that grows increasingly out of control. Physical damage resulting from bulimia includes wild swings in body weight, loss of tooth enamel and broken blood vessels in the eyes caused by vomiting.People afflicted by binge eating disorder have a compulsion to eat, but do not purge afterwards. They have the same psychological suffering of guilt and shame as bulimics, but these feelings only lead to more eating. Binge eating can result in morbid obesity, Heart disease and Diabetes, but is more easily treated than bulimia nervosa.Fortunately, help is available for those with eating disorders. Psychiatric, nutritional and pharmaceutical therapies can do much to treat and even cure the most severe cases of anorexia, bulimia and binge eating disorder. Knowledge of the signs and symptoms of each is the first step toward diagnosis and treatment.