Beautiful women are thin women. This is certainly what society would have us believe. Unfortunately, this belief causes many young women to be obsessed with thinness, obsessed to the point of illness, obsessed to the point of anorexia nervosa. Anorexia nervosa is a psychological disorder characterized by loss of weight, fear of fatness, and distortion of body image. People with anorexia have both metabolic and hormonal disturbances. Symptoms may include loss of appetite, loss of menstrual function, increased physical activity, increased appetite with forced vomiting to control weight, preoccupation with food and cooking, episodes of gorging, and enjoyment in losing weight (Anorexia, 264). The best treatment for anorexia is psychological, but along with this treatment must come an understanding of the disease.
Many people have no idea why anorexia exists or what it involves. People think, "If she would just eat, she would be fine." They do not realize that the woman has a psychological disorder with many aspects. Anorexia usually occurs in adolescent girls, with only 1 in 18 male sufferers. If a person is more than 20% underweight, she is diagnosed as having anorexia. Anorexics want to have self-control and believe that by deliberately starving themselves, they will be in control of their bodies and achieve a sense of self-esteem (Rumney, 2).
Most anorexics think that they are too fat, so they begin to diet. After starting to diet, women begin to feel somewhat in control of their bodies. Because of that control, they do not want to stop dieting for fear that they will once again become overweight. Before anorexics begin to lose weight, they are usually "compliant, docile, obsessive, hard working and without evidence of obvious neuropsychiatric disturbance" (Rumney, 3). Anorexics are typically from upper middle-class families that stress achievement and have values that are reinforced by society. Families of anore...