Monday, May 2, 2011

Eating Disorders

A serious issue especially here in the United States is the idea of eating disorders. These terrible habits consist of anything from Anorexia Nervosa to Bulimia Nervosa to Binge Eating. Found most commonly in women trying to get to the ideal body size nearly ten million women and girls suffer from anorexia and/or bulimia in the United States alone. Possibly even more shocking is the amount of men also involved in these terrible habits, nearly one million men and boys suffer from anorexia and/or bulimia in the United States. Many consequences exist because of these practices including Osteoporosis, Electrolyte imbalances, low heart beat, distorted thinking, abdominal pain, hypertension, diabetes, as well as cardiac arrest and death. These are not consequences that should be reached, if someone is experiencing the urge to use these tactics then they should seek help. Even young children are being affected by these horrible practices nearly 81% of ten year olds are afraid of being fat. I think that this is an awful stat and we need to be more aware of children and what they are watching and doing because a little 10 year old girl or boy should not be worrying about their appearance to this extent.
I feel that this is an extremely serious issue, that parents, friends, and family all need to be looking out for because the victims of these terrible addictions are too afraid to seek help because they feel that they need their image to be similar to what the media portrays as the best looking person. Women who do practice these tactics are twelve times more likely to die than women of the same age, when I first heard that statistic I could not believe it. To think that women are putting that much pressure on themselves to be skinny is just heartbreaking because it should not matter what the media perceives as the perfect person. I hope in my generation we are able to get a handle on this but with the way the media is currently I feel that there is a large fight left in the future.

1 comment:

  1. This is a very important topic and issue. Our society shows these young girls that they need to be a certain weight in order to be beautiful. It is sickening. Not only do we have eating disorders but we have an overeating problem. Americans consume so much more food than any other country, yet the media puts these size 0 girls in front of the faces of our younger girls. How do we convince the media that this is wrong? More people and organizations have been fighting these issues to show girls they are beautiful but in my opinion its going to be a long time before we can change the idea of what is beautiful and that is really crappy!

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