Two months before Shikha (name changed) a 15-year-old from Chandigarh, walked into the psychiatry ward of the Government Medical College and Hospital (GMCH) Sector 32, she was a healthy girl with a height of 155 cm and weighing around 59 kg. Now, she was reduced to a mere 30 kg, with a highly abnormal BMI of 12.5.

Doctors looking into her case said the girl had come under the influence of her weight-conscious cousin and had stopped eating in order to ‘maintain’ her figure. The self-induced starving had resulted in a perennial loss of appetite. Apart from making her irritable, in no time she began hiding and throwing away food, subsisting on just a bowl of spinach, skimmed milk and half a chapati a day. Instead of consuming the desired 2,600 calories a day, the girl’s daily intake had reduced to merely 200 to 300 calories.

It took the doctors eight weeks of regular monitoring to bring the patient back to a normal diet. After regular follow-ups lasting two years, the girl began taking regular meals and came to weighing around 45 kg.

“This is a classic case of anorexia nervosa, where weight reduction is self-induced. The patient developed a mindset that any amount of weight looked bad on her. While we were monitoring her case, the girl kept suspecting that we were adding calories to her diet and that she was developing bulges around her stomach,” says Dr Manju Mathur, the chief dietician at the GMCH. She took up the case along with a team of psychiatrists and clinical psychologists.

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