Changing a Lifestyle in Only Six-Weeks
Jennifer is a twenty-year-old college student struggling with body image issues. She is a size eight. She has never developed an interest in athletics and has never exercised in her life. She has no muscle tone and has a high body fat percentage. Jennifer is not confident about her body. She wants to be skinny and is constantly dieting. Instead of eating healthy and balanced meals, she skips meals often. When she does eat, she eats only fried foods like French fries and hamburgers and refuses to eat fruits and vegetables.
Samantha is Jennifer's friend at college. She is an athlete. She is a runner and a weight lifter. She is training for the Boston Marathon, her second marathon, that is three months away. She runs for an hour three days a week and on the weekends runs for longer distances. She also weight lifts three times a week in the gym. Samantha is very confident and is in the best shape of her life. She eats a lot of fruits, vegetables, and lean protein. She has very defined muscles and a low body fat percentage.
Jennifer admires Samantha's discipline in exercise and healthy eating, but she resists exercising and eating well. She is afraid to become too muscular and develop a manly physique. Jennifer strives to look like a supermodel, not like an athlete. Samantha encourages Jennifer to go to the gym to weight lift with her but Jennifer refuses. Jennifer lacks motivation and is not interested in participating in ?masculine? activities like bodybuilding. After months of coercing, Samantha finally convinces Jennifer to go to the gym with her. Jennifer succumbs because she hopes to meet some hot guys at the gym. Samantha convinces Jennifer to go to the gym with her three days a week for six weeks. After that, if she does not like it, Samantha will never bother her again about taking up an exercise regime.
When Jennifer arrives for the first time at the gym, she is surprised to see how many women are working out with weights. Half of the people weightlifting are women. Jennifer also observes that the majority of women have very feminine physiques. They are muscular, lean, and have very attractive figures. Jennifer was expecting to see very few women weightlifting. In addition, she expected those women to be very muscular and masculine looking.
Leininger’s theory of nursing: Cultural care diversity and universality (1998). Nursing Science Quarterly. 1(152) DOI: 10.1177/089431848800100408
According to the Sports Medicine and Arthroscopy Review’s article on the female athlete triad, in the past forty years, American women have become increasingly involved in athletics as a result of laws allowing them to participate in sports. (Lebrun and Rumball) For instance, Cathy Rigby won eight Olympic gold medals in gymnastics during the ‘60’s and 70’s when these laws were just coming into effect. (Brunet) Nevertheless, there is an ugly hidden underbelly to the many benefits of women’s increased participation in sports. Many sports have very high standards for body image, which has led to the increasing prevalence of three “separate… but interrelated conditions” collectively known as the female athlete triad. (Lebrun and Rumball) Despite Cathy Rigby’s aforementioned success, an article by Dr. Michael Brunet reveals that she was severely affected by the most well-known of the female athlete triad: the eating disorder. This eventually caused her to suffer cardiac arrest twice. (Brunet) These effects are not limited to elite athletes, however; high school athletes are also affected by the triad, particularly those participating in sports “in which leanness is perceived to optimize performance” or which use “specific weight categories.” (Lebrun) The three components of the triad, osteoporosis, amenorrhea, and disordered eating, are increasingly becoming an unfortunate effect of distorted body image on sports.
Issues of culture are often controversial. LaBorde (2010) has noted that culture is always a factor in conflict. Ironically, conflict can provide nurses with an excellent opportunity for developing compassion that will lead nurses unto a place of meeting in which there is a deep respect for differences and equally intentional openness to the possibility of connection. Healthcare practitioners are confronted in a daily basis with the practical manifestation of these issues. In particular, nurses are more confronted by cultural issues than the other healthcare providers because nurses spend majority of their time with patients. However, some nurses are reluctant to confront and discuss the cultural issues because of lack of knowledge in dealing with patients of diverse cultures (Tjale & Villiers, 2004).
Within the past ten years, the rise of eating disorders has gotten more public attention. This spark increased scientific research geared toward explaining and responding to this disaster. It is now widely recognized that body image dissatisfaction, broadly defined as strong negative feelings about the body, are persistent among women, especially concerning weight and dieting. Merely being a women in our society means feeling too fat (Wolszon 542). Survey data indicate that three fourths of normal weight women in the United States feel fat, more than half of adult women in the United States are on a diet, and on study showed that nearly 80% of fourth grade girls are watching their weight (Shelly Levitt 64).
Over the years the rise in body image dissatisfaction has grown as both male and female progress to adulthood. This factor can be contributed to societal standards that the media presents to the public daily. These standards continue to rise making the body image more difficult to attain. With these standards comes the push to seek the “perfect body”. This myth of true beauty commonly found in today’s society, is the price that adolescents buy into often sacrificing their health. The perfect body can often present a distorted view of one-self leading to unhealthy methods of weight reduction. The most common methods for weight reduction are the diseases Anorexia and Bulimia. The similarities and differences between Anorexia and Bulimia will be used to prove that the society’s pressure to fit a certain mold contribute to the onset of the disease.
Terry Yarber, a single overweight mother of a sixteen year old and two adolescents, wipes away the salty tears from her pale face so that her daughter does not see the fear inside her. Weighing only ninety one pounds, strapped to a hospital bed with a tube down her throat is a girl named Sherie. Sherie thinks the thought of food is repulsive. For instance, she doesn't bother to count calories, carbohydrates, or watch out for bad fat or good fat. Sherie does not bother to eat at all. The most she has had to eat in the last three days are two baby carrots, one slice of low carbohydrate bread, and one leaf of lettuce. While Ms. Yarber sits next to her daughter, she try's to look in to her deep blue crystal eyes but all she sees is a hallow glaze staring back at her. She tells Sherie the news that was just given to her by the doctor. "Unfortunately, she is isn't letting her body get the kind of nutrients it needs. If she does not start eating she will die a painful death. In fact, she is starving herself" said Dr. Roth. Teenage anorexia is a simple diet that has become an obsession. That person concentrates extraordinary energy on the diet, which can become more important, then anyone or anything else in the world. (Sacker 10)
Women in our culture today have developed an obsession with body image and weight that has contributed to the development of eating disorders. The media portrays super-thin models and women take that as the ideal of what they “should” look like. This can have a tremendous impact on their self esteem, and on both the low and high end of the BMI scale, a measure of body fat calculated using your height and weight; whether it be a woman with anorexia, or a woman with obesity. Men also experience this pressure to be muscular and tall, yet it is small compared to what women face. Statistics of college men show that 25% binge eat, 24% diet and 3% purge (Cain, Epler, Steinley, and Sher, 2012). Studies show that people with higher BMI’s experience more body dissatisfaction and and negative body image than people with lower BMI’s (Duncan, al-Nakeeb, and Nevill, 2013). When people feel bad about their body they can experience low self esteem: when a person feels inadequate and lacks respect for the self (Mäkinen, Puukko-Viertomies, Lindberg, Siimes, & Aalberg, 2012). Someone with low self esteem is more at risk for experiencing body dissatisfaction, which can lead to abnormal eating habits (Mäkinen, Puukko-Viertomies, Lindberg, Siimes, & Aalberg, 2012). This can take two forms, dietary restraint and binge eating. High and low BMI has a negative impact on self esteem and body image of women due to the pressure to be perfect in today’s society. The presentation of the following studies of children and adults will seek to understand the differences in men and women and their relationship with BMI, self esteem, and body image through its effect on eating disorders, body dissatisfaction, and the thin-ideal portrayed by the media.
In Women’s Studies, we covered about body politics in the 1970s. During that time, exercise becomes so popular for women for the reason that they were encouraged to become more toned and muscular. She described a perfect body by saying that a perfect body is a slender body with toned muscles, long legs, small waist, big bust, and wider hips. Even though she thinks that she is fat, she did not go to the gym to exercise or to lose weight because even if she wanted to, she still does not have the freedom to do so because of her busy schedule. She was also asked if girls of today have a good body image and she responded, “I am thirty-five right now and if I don’t even feel good about my body, I think that girls younger than me are struggling with feeling insecure about their body as well.” With those words, she added that younger girls tend to compare themselves to other girls more and therefore they try to achieve the body that those girls have and that is where they start feeling more insecure about their body when they could not reach that
Puerto Rico becoming a state could benefit Puerto Rico & the U.S. Since Puerto Ricans cannot vote for presidency, have no representatives, and don’t get fair funding. If Puerto Rico became a state, they would have everything we do. Right now Puerto Ricans only gets half the medicare that the states get. 54% of Puerto Ricans have voted for a change (to be independent or become a state). If Puerto Rico became a state we would get a extra 20 billion dollars from the U.S. we would also get extra financial help. Puerto Rico needs tha...
Women in Iraq are capable of being physically or emotionally hurt by Iraqi males, like a brother, father, cousin, or husband. Women are also vulnerable to hurt by members of Islamist armed groups, militias, Iraqi government forces, foreign soldiers, and staff of foreign private military security. Women have paid the highest price due to violent religious extremism acts. Violence has made many Iraqi women more isolated, and many have lost husbands, brothers, fathers, and sons. The kidnapping, rape, and murder rates of women in Iraq is on rising everyday. Women have been victims of more abuses now than they have in the past 60 years.
Transcultural nursing requires us to care for our patients by providing culturally sensitive care over a broad spectrum of patients. The purpose of this post is to describe cultural baggage, ethnocentrism, cultural imposition, prejudice, discrimination, and cultural congruence. I will also give an example of each term to help you understand the terminology related to nursing care. I will definite cultural self-assessment and explain why it is valuable for nurses to understand what their own self-assessment means. Finally, I will describe the five steps to delivering culturally congruent nursing care and how I have applied these concepts in my nursing practice.
The female athlete triad consists of three parts; disordered eating i.e. anorexia nervosa and bulimia nervosa, amenorrhea, and osteoporosis. “Originally termed ‘female athlete triad,’ the name was derived at a meeting led by members of the American College of Sports Medicine in the early 1990s” (Kazis & Iglesias). The meeting was held due to an alarming increase in stress fracture rates, decrease in bone mineral density, and menstrual dysfunction. In 1972, the passage of Title IX was passed that mandated equal athletic opportunities for men and women. Since then, there has been a record high of almost 2 million female athletes participating in high school and college level sports. With the increase of female athletes, there is also an increase of competition whether it is to be the fastest, strongest, or skinniest. Athletes either at a collegiate level or an elite level, have unrealistic expectations placed on them to maintain a low body weight. Pressure to attain a perfect body can come from all different outside forces, such as: coaches, teammates, parents, siblings, and the athlete herself. The obsession to achieve this goal can lead to other health-relating problems such weakening bone density which will lead to stress fractures and irregular menstruations which can possibly lead to fertility issues in the future.
Due to the media’s influence, women establish perplexed views of their own bodies, leading to the development of eating disorders. Eating disorders are massive issues within today’s society. The author, Sheila Lintott emphasizes in her article, “Sublime Hunger: A Consideration of Eating Disorders beyond Beauty”, that eating disorders are the “most dangerous mental disorders, resulting in a six time more likely risk of death, which is four times the death risk of major depression” (Lintott 78). Because women are striving to look thinner, they tend to follow an unhealthy lifestyle. They begin self-starvation in fears of becoming fat. Unfortunately, due to beauty related pressures, there has been an increase in body dysmorphic disorders. Body
The struggle for the ideal body has haunted women since the 1800’s. Different from today’s
Madeleine Leininger is a nurse who realized that cultural care was an important concept in nursing. In the 1950s she found that behavioral issues in children stemmed from a cultural basis due to nursing having a lack of knowledge in a variety of cultural awareness (Buschur-Betancourt, 2015). The purpose of this paper is to identify the eight reasons Madeleine Leininger states transcultural nursing is necessary. I will describe the cultural diversity and how it relates to my field of nursing. I will also provide three ways that I have incorporated culturally sensitive care toward my patients.