Healthy Diet for Anorexics

According to information from the medical website Medline Plus, anorexia is an eating disorder characterized by self-starvation and delusional tendencies, where the patient believes that she still needs to lose weight despite already being underweight. Anorexia carries with it a host of potential "tells," including exercising compulsively, cutting food into tiny bites, yellowish skin, thinning hair, and significant weight loss in a short period of time. There is a healthy out for anorexics, howeve—the employment of a healthy, nutrient-dense diet.

Nutrient-Dense Diet

• Comply with a healthy, nutrient-dense diet to provide your body with the required level of vitamins, minerals, nutrients and calories without the possibility of unwanted fat gain while recovering from anorexia. The best way to accomplish this is to consume a plant-based diet containing lower amounts of dietary fat. Structure your diet around the consumption of fruits and vegetables, two food types that are incredibly low in calories while being simultaneously high in nutritional value. While following a diet to help recover from anorexia, consume at least one serving of fruits and one serving of vegetables with every meal. Additionally, make it a point to include plenty of lean protein to help your body rebuild the muscle lost during the unhealthy dieting practices of anorexia. Increasing your quantity of lean mass will also serve to regulate your metabolism, making it easier to keep fat off in the future, which is a win-win for someone with body image issues. Consume a medium-sized piece (roughly four ounces) of lean meat (turkey, chicken, seafood or low-fat beef) or dairy with each meal. This should provide your body with sufficient protein to begin undoing the damage caused during your stint with anorexia. Round out each meal with a small serving of healthy unsaturated fat. Dietary fat is important to keep your body's hormonal processes functioning normally, and unsaturated fats can help to lower cholesterol levels, thus improving health. Accomplish this by cooking your meat in healthy cooking oils like coconut oil, peanut oil, sesame oil or olive oil, and including fish oil capsules with many of your meals for an additional source of healthy fat.

Anorexia Diet

• Consider the following sample menu for a recovering anorectic attempting to eat a healthy diet. For breakfast, eat a bowl of oatmeal with berries, served with a large glass of milk and a vegetable of your choice. Include a scoop of protein powder in the oatmeal to add some flavor to the dish along with adding in some extra building blocks to recover muscle mass. For lunch, begin your meal with a large apple or other piece of fruit and a garden salad. Round out the meal with a fair-sized turkey sandwich on a whole-grain bagel with more lettuce and tomato. For dinner, eat a piece of chicken, cooked in heart-healthy olive oil. Serve that with a spinach, tomato and cucumber salad along with another a small bowl of cherries or grapes to round out the day's meals.