Knowing the Dangers of Eating Disorders
Knowing the Dangers of Eating Disorders
Imagine a thirteen-year-old girl who weighs 60 pounds because she is starving herself. Every time she looks in the mirror, she sees herself as fat. Picture her parents watching their daughter literally disintegrating into thin air. This is the life of a family dealing with an eating disorder. Eating disorders are a major problem with the young people of today's society. While anorexia and bulimia are sociological problems plaguing the world's youth, there are also other eating disorders. This "fat phobia", or fear of being over-weight, disturbs people to the point where they are in a way, committing suicide.
It is not surprising that eating disorders are on the increase due to the value society places on being thin. In modern Western culture, women are given the message at a very young age that in order to be happy and successful, they must be thin. Every time you walk into a store you are surrounded by the images of withered models that appear on the front cover of fashion magazines. Women are constantly bombarded with advertisements catering to what is considered desirable. Thousands of women and girls are starving themselves this very minute trying to attain what the fashion industry considers to be the ideal waif-like figure. During this paper I will mainly be discussing the effects on females, though males are afflicted with eating disorders, the causes are different than those in the opposite sex.
The average model weighs 23% less than the average woman. Maintaining a weight that is 15% below your expected body weight fits the criteria for anorexia, so most models, according to medical standards, fit into the category of being anorexic (Brumberg 205). Women must realize that society's ideal body image may in fact be achievable, but at a detrimental price to one’s body. The photos we see in magazines are not a clear image of reality. Adolescents and women striving to attain society's unattainable ideal more often than not, increase their feelings of inadequacy. In contemporary society young women easily cling to dieting precisely because it is widely practiced and an admired form of cultural expression. In the twentieth century, the body—not the face—became the focus of female beauty. As a consequence of this media portrayal of beauty, dieting has moved from the periphery to the center of women’s lives and culture. Dieting has manifested...