Young Girls with Eating Disorders

You open up a magazine and fine a beautiful woman who is 110 pounds soaking wet. Her eyes are the starring straight at the camera with her thin lips clinched together and her neck slightly raised. This in my most cases is what beauty is brought out to be. Sometimes you have to ask yourself, how many of those girls do you actually see? For others its, how do I become that? Many teen girls suffer with anorexia nervosa, an eating disorder in which girls use starvation diets to try to lose weight. They starve themselves down to skeletal thinness yet still think that they are overweight. Bulimia, meanwhile, is a disorder in which young women binge on food and then force themselves to vomit. They also often use laxatives to get food out of their system. All of these young women who suffer from this problem are considered to suffer from a psychiatric disorder. While the causes are debatable, one thing that is clear is that these young women have a distorted body image. It is a very serious issue when someone 's body shape is determined by genetic disposition and yet they try to alter it to fit some kind of imaginary ideal of how a person should look. One of the most serious problems is that female nature is not what society says it should be. Some researchers theorize that anorexia is a young woman 's way of canceling puberty. Since they lack body fat, anorexics don 't get their periods and often lose their sexual characteristics such as public hair. They remain, in other words, little girls. There is also the complex issue of women feeling that by having an eating disorder they are finally in control of something in their life. This may sound strange, but much research has shown that women who have been abused or neglected in their childhoods develop these problems of control. (http://www.anred.com/medpsy.html). Studies suggest that eating disorders often begin in the transition from being a kid to puberty. They are directly connected to pubertal maturation and

Cited: Adolescent Girls," Developmental Psychology, 1996, vol. 32, no.4, 631-635. "Prediction of Eating Problems: An 8-Year Study of Adolescent Girls," Developmental Psychology, 1994, vol.3O, No.6, 823-834.