DOES AMERICA STILL HAVE AN "UNREALISTIC VISION OF BEAUTY" THAT CAUSES EATING DISORDERS, OR DOES YOUR GENERATION HAVE MORE REALISTIC EXPECTATIONS?

According to the National Eating Disorders Association, "Eating disorders are extreme expressions of a range of weight and food issues experienced by both men and women. They include anorexia nervosa, bulimia nervosa, and compulsive overeating." The typical person who struggles with this disorder is a teenage or young woman. But there is more recent evidence that among the many other groups who struggle with anorexia nervosa are prepubescent and postmenopausal women and males of all ages. As society learns more about the practices of those with issues with food and weight, the disorder itself has become more easily and quickly identified and diagnosed. However, successful treatments have remained as difficult to implement as ever. 

Eating disorders have been around for a very long time. We catch glimpses of them in stories like those of the ancient Romans who gorged at feasts, then purged, or St. Catherine of Siena, who ate only herbs and vomited everything else. They were not scientifically acknowledged until the late 19th century, when British physician William Gull and French doctor Charles Lasegue both noticed incidences of "self-starvation" among adolescent girls. They believed it was tied to irrational female behavior; a common medical practice at the time linked nearly all health problems in women to female biology. In the 1930s, researchers began to realize that eating disorders were legitimate diseases with both physical and psychological components. 

Public discussions, available resources, and society's awareness of eating disorders has grown dramatically since the 1980s. In 1983, popular singer Karen Carpenter died of complications from a long battle with anorexia. People suffering with eating disorders began to appear on such early talk show television programs as Phil Donahue, Oprah Winfrey and Sally Jessy Raphael. The scientific community took note and began to study the phenomenon as well. It is now widely believed that eating disorders are a by-product of individuals' sometimes unacknowledged and often repressed emotional, psychological, and sociological struggles that become intricately connected to one's body image, self-esteem, and behaviors. 

In order to treat any of these disorders, what must be addressed first are the underlying feelings that may be causing the person to have issues with weight and food. These may include low self-esteem, poor or inaccurate body image, depression, anxiety, loneliness, a lack of control over one's life, perfectionism, fear, sense of failure, and troubled family and personal relationships. 

Anorexia nervosa is an eating disorder that is characterized by an intense and irrational fear of body fat and weight gain that leads to extreme and unhealthy levels of dieting, irregular eating behaviors, and unusual food preferences. Frequently a person who is struggling with anorexia nervosa engages in rigid, ritualized, and often secretive behaviors that reflect an unusually strong determination to become thinner and thinner even when the person's weight is at or below a healthy level. In many instances, such people hold a distorted misperception of their body weight and shape that is not reflected in their actual weight or the perceptions of them by others. Individuals can have episodes of engaging in behaviors associated with anorexia nervosa or struggle with the disorder for years. If extreme and left unaddressed, individuals can starve themselves to death or cause irreparable and irreversible harm to their bodies.


Bulimia nervosa is characterized by ongoing cycles of binge eating and purging. When a person engages in binge eating, he or she consumes an unusually large quantity of food in a rapid, automatic, and uncontrollable way. The typical binge eater can consume 5,000 to 10,000 calories in one episode and is often filled with self-loathing that leads him or her to want to purge what was consumed by self-induced vomiting or by resorting to a combination of excessive and restrictive dieting, excessive exercising, using laxatives and diuretics. Exercise bulimia refers to one kind of bulimia nervosa in which a person engages in a ritualized cycle of consuming a large quantity of food and then exercising in an excessive amount, usually cardio, in order to burn off the extra calories. 

Binge-eating disorder or compulsive eating is characterized by periods of impulsive gorging or continuous eating. While there is no purging, there may be sporadic fasts and repetitive diets. As with bulimia nervosa, a person who struggles with compulsive eating may be of low, normal, or obese body weight. One sign of a person with such a disorder may be a high degree of fluctuation in weight in a short amount of time. 


As far as we know, eating disorders are not common in every culture. They seem to be most common in the West. Some researchers and feminist groups have noted that certain cultural conditions seem to encourage the development of eating disorders. The Western media has long had an obsession with slimness, presenting it as the equivalent of beauty and happiness. The objectification of the human body, particularly among women, may further the prevalence of eating disorders in places like the Americas and Europe. While images that join thinness with happiness may not cause eating disorders by themselves, they may provide a channel for those persons pre-disposed to eating disorders to focus unhealthy impulses. They may also blind society to the seriousness of the problems eating disorders can cause. 

Many organizations and resources are now available to help individuals, their families, and friends who are struggling to address any of these eating disorders. From online chat groups, autobiographies, self-help books, and support groups, every individual can find help to address an eating disorder. However, according to most eating disorder groups, rates of eating disorders continue to rise, among both sexes and all ages and ethnic groups.