So what exactly is an eating disorder? Well, it’s actually much more complex than one would think. An eating disorder is any pre-occupation with weight, and as you can see, it’s a wide spread problem. The two most common and most harmful eating disorders are anorexia nervosa and bulimia nervosa. Anorexia nervosa is when a person starves themselves to the point of vomiting. They do this on a day to day basis and never see the results of their purging, they always view themselves as overweight and continue to purge until they are dead. Bulimia nervosa is over-eating to the point of purging. A person eats and eats until they vomit everything they ate back out, with the same results as the anorexics. These binge/purge cycles are

Fontaine, Karen Lee. The Nursing Clinics of North America: “The Conspiracy of Culture: Women’s Issues in Body Size.” September, 1991.

Friedman, Sandra S. When Girls Feel Fat: Helping Girls Through Adolescence. 1997.

One side effect and also the root of eating disorders is depression. An eating disorder starts with low self-esteem, a negative image of the self. When a person views themselves as inadequate due to their body they have low self-esteem. This low self-esteem is then exacerbated by the societal image that the only way to be happy is to fit the ideal body image. The victim of socio-cultural ideals feels that they will never amount to anything because of their body, and the disorder begins. This may seem ridiculous, that a person feels inadequate or even useless because of their body, but it isn’t. Consider the way people dress. One can easily say that 85% of the young adults in our school wear clothes that are considered trendy, like Abercrombie and Fitch, American Eagle, Ralph Lauren, and others. Now consider the models that fashion these clothes, their bodies represen

Some topics in this essay:
Teens United, Ralph Lauren, eating disorders, eating disorder, Decision Making”, Reppuci Dickon, North America, Girls Adolescence, Size” September, Women’s Studies, low self-esteem, bulimia nervosa, body image, cultural ideal, stop eating disorders, anorexia nervosa, stop eating,