Teens with Eating Disorders

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Recommended: Media influence on anorexia

Teens with Eating Disorders In our society today, we are constantly hearing about more and more teenagers, mostly girls, who are suffering from an eating disorder. For reasons that are unclear, these young women are developing potentially life-threatening eating disorders as a way of achieving a perfect model body. There are many different types and classifications of eating disorders, but the two most common ones in which teens suffer from and are diagnosed with are called bulimia nervosa and anorexia nervosa. People with bulimia, known as bulimics, indulge in bingeing, which are episodes of eating large amounts of food to satisfy their hunger and craving for food. Then there is purging, this happens after bingeing and it is a means of getting rid of the food by vomiting or using laxatives. Anorexia Nervosa is a disorder in which preoccupation with dieting and thinness leads to excessive weight loss. Anorexics have an intense fear of fat.(American Anorexia Bulimia Association, INC). People with anorexia, whom doctors sometimes call anorectics, severely limit their food intake. About half of them also have bulimia symptoms. A lot of the time a person suffering from anorexia doesn’t realize that they have an eating problem, they are more concerned with their image than food. In this report I want to primarily focus on teens with eating disorders and why they have resorted to this way of life. There are a lot of unclear reasoning of why people are inflicting pain, in a sense, upon themselves, but it mostly has to do with these teens self image and confidence, and the dire need to like one of those magazine models. To them thin=pretty+happiness. First, I researched and found to some degree why these teens are... ... middle of paper ... .../www.wcsu.edu/~wiss/400/killea.htm Kuehnel, Deborah. Eating Disorders. Aug. 1998. http://wwwaddictions.net/info.htm Levine & Smolak. 2000. 10 Things Parents Can Do to Help Prevent Eating Disorders. http://www.edap.org/10things.html LQS Programs, 2000. http://laquesabe.com/lqswww/Programs.htm The Media, Body Image, and Eating Disorders. 1997 Mintle, Linda Ph.D. Risk Factors of Eating Disorders. 2000. http://admin.christianity.com Shiltz, Tom. Men and Eating Disorders: The Latest Facts. http://www.edap.org/men.html What Causes Eating Disorders? 2001. http://webmd.lycos.com/content/article/1680.50413 Zastrow, Charles. Understanding Human Behavior and the Social Environment, Fifth Edition. 2001, pg. 246-47 & 324-29. Zinn, Janet. Dieting, could it be the problem rather than the solution? http://caringonline.com/eatdis/editorials/zinn/zinn/htm

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