According to the royal college of psychiatrists, one in every hundred secondary school girls has full blown anorexia, one in every fifty women aged fifteen to forty five have bulimia.
There are huge pressures coming from a variety of sources for modern men and women to strive for perfection. Many women's magazines attempt to confront the problems of eating disorders head on with straight talking articles; however these are often the worst offenders in portraying and encouraging women to desire the idealistic image of the female body.
In countries where food is scarce eating disorders are not very common at all. In fact these countries hold bigger size people in high esteem and fatness is sign of good living. In westernized cultures the disorders are very common and are on the increase.
There are many theories as to why eating disorders are on the increase, some suggest that eating problems have always been with us but have never been talked about as they are now. Other sources suggest that more people are developing eating disorders as ways of coping with the pressure of our commercialized materialistic culture. There has been a massive change in cultural values over the last century. At one time in our society you were successful if you were able to get enough food to eat and were able to avoid disease. These standards for success have changed drastically over the last hundred years.
The modern pressures on women to achieve the ideal standard of beauty, to have successful career, be a good mother and a perfect wife, are leading women to adopt self destructive ideals.
The number of women with bulimia who have harmed themselves in other ways is also rising. Women with bulimia already damage their bodies by binging on food then purging themselves by making themselves vomit or by taking laxatives, are increasingly taking drugs and alcohol which further damages their bodies.
Something that is generally agreed on by professional working with eating disorders is that people who develop eating disorders have had emotional or psychological problems as children. I It is considered highly likely that people with eating disorders experienced a childhood upbringing that lead to the development of low self-esteem. Lack of self esteem leads to overdependence on other people to provide a sense of emotional security and self worth. In reality it is only the sufferer that can give these values to themselves and so relationships can be fraught with disappointment.
Low self esteem can cause problems in adult life as it impacts on a person’s ability to be assertive. It is difficult to say what you want if you don’t think you deserve anything.
There are more and more children developing eating disorders today than ever before. Could this have anything to do with the media, fashion and music industries, who else creates the impression for children how it is they should look and what values they should hold in esteem. The industries responsible for creating these idols use models with figures that for most women are unrealistic and unobtainable. Teenage girls are dieting as young as eleven and twelve, sometimes even younger than this. For children to be dieting at these ages has other consequences for physcial and psycholgical development which will cause problems right through adult life.
Women are ten times more likely to suffer from an eating disorder than men are. There is no definitive evidence to say why this is but the gender roles and identities that are promoted in our culture may place more pressures on women than they do men.
Many counsellors believe that the reasons why men develop eating disorders are the same reasons why women develop eating disorders. It has also been suggested that there is an equivalent of eating disorders for men that is the obsession with gaining weight and muscle through use of steroids and weightlifting. It is easy to draw parallels between the ideal body image for men and that of women and those body images are promoted in popular culture. Although this is an issue about body image it is unlikely to turn to an eating disorder. For both men and women eating disorders are the result of emotional and psychological disturbances that are expressed through that person’s behavior.
There are many variation on the theme that for women “thin is beautiful” “beautiful equals happiness”. Practically every women’s magazine has front cover headlines about diets, losing weight, slimmer tums, firmer bums; along side the images of well presented cover girls.
So what message are women buying in these magazines? To be normal and acceptable you have to look a certain way. Is that really true, does our culture only value people if they look a certain way?
Eating disorders have attracted a lot of media attention recently which will hopefully raise the awareness of the problems around weight, dieting and body image. Despite this attention the number of women developing eating disorders is still rising. For the professionals and for the public there is still a lot of misunderstanding and a lot to learn about eating disorders.
Topic: A brief introduction to Eating Disorders (Read 2057 times)
January 21, 2011, 02:36:49 PM