 Hello, today I am answering the question, why is weight restoration so important in anorexia nervosa? This is a question that I have been asked a lot by parents, by staff working with young people, because when someone's weight is low with anorexia, then the idea of gaining weight is incredibly distressing and it can be incredibly distressing for those around them too. And people often say, well, is this really so important right now? Can we not do something to help them with their emotional vulnerability and the underpinnings of the disorder and then the food will follow later on? And the short answer is, no, sadly not. And there are two reasons for this, two, that's four, two, two reasons for this. So the first one is the physical danger that we put ourselves in when we're very underweight. So there are lots of potential complications, but we do become at risk of things like organ failure. So in the short term, we can have organ failure in the longer term. If we are at a low weight for a longer time, then things like osteoporosis become a potential issue. There are lots of things that can go wrong and sometimes really quite quickly when someone is very underweight. So from a physical point of view, actually getting the weight back up to healthy or something approaching healthy is a priority. But secondly, we can't begin to access therapeutic interventions when our weight is very low. So your brain is an organ that needs feeding and fueling like any other part of the body. And when your brain is malnourished, then you do not think as you would do if it were nourished. So if you have ever worked with or cared for someone with anorexia, you may well have seen signs of this thinking. So when our cognitive, no, when our cognition is impaired, we get things like very black and white thinking, very all or nothing might get very, very perfectionist or obsessive and our thinking might be much more akin to that of like a three-year-old child than an adolescent or an adult because our brain is starved. We do not have the processing power to deal with complex thoughts, feelings and emotions. That means that therapy isn't gonna be something that we can access until our brain is better nourished. And so for those two reasons, the physical, potential physical consequences and the fact that we cannot access therapy while our brain is malnourished, they're the two reasons why weight restoration is always very, very high on the agenda when a young person has anorexia nervosa. So please, if you are working with or caring for someone with this condition, bear in mind that even though this might feel like a really, really horrible stage, it's an absolutely vital stage in order for any form of kind of medium to long-term recovery to be able to take place. Good luck. I hope you found this helpful. Please take a moment to leave a comment down below if you found this helpful or if you have other questions you'd like me to explore in other videos. If you liked it, give it a thumbs up and please remember to subscribe if you would like to be made aware of my other videos as they are made. Thanks for watching. I hope it helped and goodbye.