Eating Disorders: Who Is to Be Held Responsible?
Eating Disorders: Who is to be held responsible?
Abstract
Only a thin line separates “normal” dieting from an eating disorder. (Hesse-Biber, 1996) Unfortunately for young women in this day and age, social and economic factors pressure them to pursue the thinness ideal, even to the point of dangerous behavior. At one point in time, dieting would have been considered one of the ways to improve one’s health. Today’s society has been brainwashed to believe that in order to be healthy, one has to be painfully thin. This ideology has caused 7 million girls’ lives to be affected with eating disorders (Mooney, Knox, and Schacht, 2006).
Discussion
Defining Eating Disorders
“A man cannot be too serious about his eating, for food is the force that binds society together.” What Confucius could never have fathomed was that approximately 2500 years after his death, food would actually be the force that disrupts society beyond repair. Who would have ever thought that a simple, life-sustaining function like eating would, one day, turn into a life-threatening, suicide mission for young women and men? Eating disorders do not discriminate amongst who they attack. Man, woman, rich, poor, educated, uneducated, illiterate, Asian, Latino, African, Australian, European, American – every single community is affected by it, and more affected by it than we can ever imagine.
Eating disorder warning signs are when a person’s day to day activities are seriously affected by body image issues: When an individual looks at one’s self in the mirror and can only see themselves as physically unsatisfactory, as is in the case of anorexia nervosa and bulimia. Binge-eating disorder typically occurs not because the person is dissatisfied with the way they appear, but when they go through emotional duress and feel as if eating will make everything alright.
Anorexia nervosa: This is frequently referred to as simply anorexia. The word anorexia actually means “loss of appetite” but
Abstract
Only a thin line separates “normal” dieting from an eating disorder. (Hesse-Biber, 1996) Unfortunately for young women in this day and age, social and economic factors pressure them to pursue the thinness ideal, even to the point of dangerous behavior. At one point in time, dieting would have been considered one of the ways to improve one’s health. Today’s society has been brainwashed to believe that in order to be healthy, one has to be painfully thin. This ideology has caused 7 million girls’ lives to be affected with eating disorders (Mooney, Knox, and Schacht, 2006).
Discussion
Defining Eating Disorders
“A man cannot be too serious about his eating, for food is the force that binds society together.” What Confucius could never have fathomed was that approximately 2500 years after his death, food would actually be the force that disrupts society beyond repair. Who would have ever thought that a simple, life-sustaining function like eating would, one day, turn into a life-threatening, suicide mission for young women and men? Eating disorders do not discriminate amongst who they attack. Man, woman, rich, poor, educated, uneducated, illiterate, Asian, Latino, African, Australian, European, American – every single community is affected by it, and more affected by it than we can ever imagine.
Eating disorder warning signs are when a person’s day to day activities are seriously affected by body image issues: When an individual looks at one’s self in the mirror and can only see themselves as physically unsatisfactory, as is in the case of anorexia nervosa and bulimia. Binge-eating disorder typically occurs not because the person is dissatisfied with the way they appear, but when they go through emotional duress and feel as if eating will make everything alright.
Anorexia nervosa: This is frequently referred to as simply anorexia. The word anorexia actually means “loss of appetite” but
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