Common symptoms are not always seen in patients with anorexia nervosa disorder. Many patients with anorexia nervosa love food and have quite a good appetite.
Many patients frequently follow social media pages related to food and cooking. Many even prepare food for other family members without touching, eating or tasting the food.
Recently, I had a patient who behaved differently from other patients with food. She would put all solid and semi-solid foods in his mouth and taste them and then spit the food out of her mouth.
As her mother said, her surroundings on the table were full of leftover food that she spat out of his mouth.
There is evidence for altered processing of taste in anorexia nervosa, particularly in the areas of reward processing and hedonic sensitivity. However, research on whether people with anorexia nervosa identify taste stimuli accurately, known as taste sensitivity, has yielded mixed findings.
Contrary to the results of various studies, this patient with anorexia nervosa, who had been suffering from anorexia nervosa for a long time, understood the taste of food well and loved the taste of food. She is just afraid to swallow food.
Unfortunately, she and her family stopped the treatment sessions at the beginning of her recovery, and I don’t know if she was able to finally defeat the monster of anorexia and swallow food or not.