eating disorder (literature review)

Eating disorder is a disorder that is influenced by culture, mind and body shape. Female has a higher rate of suffering eating disorder than that of male. In the modern city, people promote the ‘perfect body shape’. This is accompanied with the impact with the psychological matters. Without the correct treatment of the disorder, a life-threatening situation to individual is resulted. For anorexia nervosa, the person eats nothing beyond minimal amount of food, so body weight drops sharply, while bulimia nervosa, out-of-control eating episodes, or binges, are followed by self-induced vomiting, excessive use of laxatives, or other attempts to purge of food. Many risk factors do not directly cause binge eating but they predispose the individual to these behaviors (Fairburn, 2002). These factors include social, biological and psychological factors. Sociocultural influences bring along disturbances of body image and eating. This pressures the idealization of thinness and disparagement of overweight. Social reinforcement and modeling promote attitudes and behavior (Fairburn, 2002). Social reinforcement means the process which people internalize attitudes and demonstrates behaviors approved by respected others. Modeling means the process in which individuals directly imitate behaviors they observe (Fairburn, 2002). Thus, body dissatisfaction is built up. The theories of sociocultural influence contain media, family and peer influences. From the mass media, the body dimensions of female models, actress and other female cultural icons become thinner. Only few overweight individuals can be the model in the media. This reinforces ‘thinness’ as a perfect model. While their body shape is a bit different from the female models, they perceived themselves as ‘fat’. For family influences, parents pressure their daughters to lose weight. They criticize them regarding weight, shape or appearance. More, the poorer the family relationship, the higher chance of suffering the eating