Social Imagination And Eating Disorders

The social imagination is an interesting topic as it addresses a concept that makes you think more in depth than you are used to. It makes you start to question things that you never thought about in a way that can possibly change your mindset. Sociological imagination is a way of thinking about familiar topics or experiences that you have or experience on a daily basis much differently. A way of looking at this is understanding that certain things that happen in society could lead to another outcome. Students of sociology can acquire the sociological imagination by doing a few things.

What is social imagination? American sociologist C. Wright Mills describes social imagination as the ability to “think yourself away from the familiar routines of everyday life” and look at them from an entirely new perspective. Quite merely it is the insight offered by the discipline of sociology. An example of sociological imagination is the ability to see things interactively. For an individual too experience a sociological imagination, they must step outside of a certain situation and observe it from another point of view, an individual must step away from a personal experience and see how others are shaped through their values in the way they act.

Millions of teens and adults are faced with eating disorders and negative body images everywhere they go. Celebrities promote unrealistic standards and display what the “acceptable” body is. Because of our stick thin role models we have in the media today much of our society holds their own body image to the unobtainable standards of celebrities. People are bombarded with images of what’s “sexy” instead of what’s healthy (Helmich). In a world based around celebrities and media, shouldn’t they be promoting a healthy body image instead of the negative ones we are being smothered with?

As of the year 2013, an estimated 805 million people worldwide suffer from Hunger. This number represents a group of people who suffer from food insecurity. This means they have inadequate access to food and don’t know when their next meal will be. This being said, an estimated 70 million people worldwide suffer from some sort of eating disorders as of 2015 with 30 million being made up of Americans. Eating Disorders can be defined as any eating habit that negatively affects ones overall health. Media has had a large impact on how both males and females see their bodies.

The article“Body and Mind: Understanding Eating Disorders” by Bridget Lowry & Mae Puckett, starts off with sharing Jenna who is a Tam student, experience with both anorexia nervosa and bulimia nervosa. Jenna didn’t really notice any changes or symptoms of the disorder, but instead it was her mother that noticed the changes and that something wasn’t right with her when she fainted out of nowhere. The fainting occurred because she was skipping all of her meals (breakfast, lunch, and dinner) and was not consuming any type of food at all. The reason Jenna developed eating disorder was because she was concerned with the way her body image looked. The authors then move on to talk about the two types of eating disorder which are anorexia and bulimia and they are both described as “intense fear of gaining

Poet Allen Ginsberg once said that “whoever controls the media-the images-controls the culture”, and nothing could be truer than this. Media plays a larger role in society within this generation more than many of us are aware of. It can easily impact people’s lives through aspects such as sports, fashion, movies or hobbies, but unfortunately, one of these impacts is how we view our body. Media constantly posts images and messages promoting a nearly unachievable and unrealistic image of what beauty looks like and it almost always has negative fallout when we struggle to meet this. This is known as an eating disorder. An eating disorder is a psychological sickness that results in dangerous eating habits and both short and long term affects on the body. People with eating disorders generally have a negative perception of their self will try to control their weight through unnecessary dieting, exercising or purging. But how does this illness begin? Social media sites, advertising, celebrities and other forms of media through society are all social pressures that are influencing people to be “perfect” and causing this expanding matter.

There are many misconceptions in our society about eating disorders. Many people choose to have an eating disorders and others don't. Low self esteem, peer pressure, and bullying may cause people to have an eating disorder.

Symbolic Interactionism is a theory focusing on the approach that has evolved from social behaviorism and that stresses the symbolic nature of human interaction (p. 46). In society, there are norms and expectations that people are expected to follow and live by and trying to achieve this ideal self-image, people sometime behave in a self-destructing behavior. Because the media creates an image that we are suppose to fit, people will go to the extreme measures to meet this look even if it involves developing an eating disorder (DeGroat).

In America, the words “beautiful”, “fit”, and “thin” are often used to describe someone that has the ideal “perfect” body, everyone’s perception of it can vary and about half of the population has the body that many people adore or aim to have. However, not everyone has or can achieve the ideal body type, some people will go to extreme measures to either gain or lose weight just to feel accepted in today’s society. These dangerous actions can result in a person developing an eating disorder that can alter their lives both physically and mentally. “An eating disorder is an illness that can be defined as having irregular or abnormal eating habits while being concerned about body weight or shape”

We live in a society ruled by the media. At every turn we’re bombarded with images of what a girl is supposed to look like, what she’s supposed to wear, and how she’s supposed to act. Models range from stick thin to plus size, with no representation of average size six girls to be found. All around the world, girls are starving themselves to look a certain way, with terms like “thigh gap” and “collarbones” running rampant in their minds. But why? What are those things really worth?

Although this is my first sociology course, I felt that the first chapter gave me a decent insight as to what sociology and social imagination are. According to the textbook, social imagination is “the ability to seed the connections between our personal experience and the larger forces of history.” I interpreted this definition simply as how we perceive what is going on around us. Social imagination could be taking a step back and reminiscing on past experiences, or even considering where we see ourselves in ten years. Each person that we pass by on a daily basis may be going through situations that we have no idea by just looking at them. I believe that social imagination can be used in the sense that you are “putting yourself in someone else’s shoes.” Do you ever take the chance to put yourself outside

It has been found that eating disorders are most common in the western and industrialized culture where food is abundant. This is because these individuals attach a lot of importance to their physical appearance and are willing to do anything to get the dream figure. An eating disorder is not just watching what one eats and exercising on a daily basis but is rather an illness that causes serious disturbances in eating behaviour, such as great and harmful cutback of the consumption of food as well as feelings of serious anxiety about their body shape or mass. They would start to stop themselves to go out anywhere just so that they could work out and burn all of the calories of a meal or snack that they had scoffed earlier. Two of the most common eating disorders are anorexia nervosa and bulimia nervosa. The regular description of a patient with either disease would be a youthful white female, with an upper social standing in a predictably socially competitive environment.

Eating disorders: noun. A group of psychological ailments characterized by intense fear of becoming obese, distorted body image, and prolonged food refusal (anorexia nervosa) and/or binge eating followed by purging through induced vomiting, heavy exercise, or use of laxatives (bulimia nervosa).These ailments are not pretty. In this society, where only the fit and thin bodies are accepted and appreciated, eating disorders are more common than they should be. Children, starting at a young age, see skinny people on television and in magazines. They hear comments on how their bodies look, then hear the same people turn around and make nasty comments on someone else’s figure. This is not okay, because it is teaching young people that anything

Social imagination can be described as one’s perspective of different concepts in the world. In the text You may ask yourself by Conley, sociology is defined as the “ability to see the connections between our personal experience and the larger forces of history” and proceeds to provide several examples such as religion. An example I have seen would be Christianity, some churches decided to create different branches under Christianity. This happened because they have experienced factors that didn’t make sense for them to continue in the church they were in. And other people would continue to say that these old churches were created long ago and doesn’t make sense to continue to go to them because this generation isn’t like the past generations. Everyone’s personal

The Social Imagination is a term coined by C. Wright Mills in his 1959 book “The Sociological Imagination”. Mills describes social imagination as “the vivid awareness of the relationship between experience and the wider society”. In a more basic form Mills is saying social imagination is the ability to look at a situation using a different perspective from what you are used to. Social Imagination can be used to analyze one's life and the customs and culture of the world around them. One example of this is tea drinking. Some people may drink tea as a substitute for coffee, for health benefits or maybe even as a form of socializing. For example, in Japan, tea is part of a cultural ceremony and there are certain rituals that must be followed.