ABSTRACT
Over the past decades, eating disorders have become relatively well known both to health professionals and to the wider public. Yet in spite of this notoriety, many people have a wrong or incomplete idea of what an eating disorder actually represents. The popular view is that it stands for an ‘eating problem’, characterized either by overeating and being overweight or by restricted food consumption and emaciation, the latter usually affecting young teenage girls or women in their early adulthood. While this view certainly reflects the clinical features of some eating disorders, it also disregards their clinical complexity and diversity. The term ‘eating disorders’ is indeed a very broad one, which has reference to a variety of pathologies including obesity, binge eating, pica or selfinduced vomiting. In many instances, however, it is used more restrictively to refer particularly to anorexia nervosa and bulimia nervosa, two syndromes which have gained prominence in the psychiatric literature of the past decades (see Vandereycken and Meermann, 1987; Vanderlinden, Norré and Vandereycken, 1992; Herzog, Deter and Vandereycken, 1992).
