Summary Of Eating Disorders

According to The National Institute of Mental Health (NIMH) website, eating disorders are actually serious and often fatal illnesses causing serve disturbances to a person’s eating behaviors. People with eating disorders often have obsessions with food, their body weight, and their shape. There is, however, a difference between an eating disorder and a diet. It is important to know the difference. Eating disorders are a daily struggle for 10 million females and 1 million males in the United States (Eating Disorder Hope). An eating disorder is a compulsion to avoid eating in order to lose weight while a diet is cutting down eating or healthier eating in order to lose weight. The three types of an eating disorders are anorexia nervosa, bulimia nervosa, and binge-eating disorder. All three disorders are important and they all deserve immediate treatment. No matter what eating disorder someone has, it can resort in organ damage and sometimes even death.

Susan Bordo, in her article, “The Globalization of Eating Disorders,” argues that images of “perfect people,” in media are causing everyone to change the way we see our bodies, which ends up causing eating disorders. She supports this claim by first giving an example of a girl who is on a no-fat diet because of all of the women that are in the media and portrayed as perfect, despite the fact that this girl is at a healthy weight, then she gives an example of an African-American girl and proves that this is happening everywhere in the world and to all races, then she gives an example of Asian countries and how there was no such thing as an eating disorder, but now when most of these countries have been westernized eating disorders have become

I thought the chapter in the textbook about eating disorders was very interesting. This is a very real and current issue in our country today. And as I learned in the reading, it affects many countries throughout the world, not just the United States. According to the PsychWatch section on page 281, “Eating Disorders Across the World”, non-Western countries are starting to be exposed to more Western and United States television and magazine advertisements, and this is resulting in more cases of eating disorders in these countries. Both men and women are affected by anorexia, bulimia, and binge eating. The statistics show that more women than men have these eating disorders. But it is hard to say if this is true, or if just more women seek help.

There is a broad spectrum of eating disorders. Bulimia nervosa (BN), anorexia nervosa (AN) (two basic types, restrictive (ANR) and binge-purge (ANBP)), and binge eating disorder (BED). People with eating disorders often have a morphed perception of their body. Often they feel the need to be perfect, and when they do not look perfect to themselves they feel great shame. Which in effect causes suicide ideation, because they feel they do not deserve to live. It appears that eating disorders may carry the highest suicide risk of any psychiatric disorder.

Many may see someone who has an eating disorder as someone who wants 'attention,' while disregarding all of the several factors that play a part in causing someone to take this path in their life. The list of causes goes on and on, yet the basics are right under our noses. Vaguely speaking, biological factors, psychological factors, and environmental factors all take a place on the stand for being causes ("Disorder Hope").

Even though eating disorders are less prevalent in society today than they have been in the past, they are still one of the most diagnosed mental illnesses today. These three illnesses have short term as well as long term effects that can leave a damaging toll on the patients’ lives and are very hard to overcome. This is shown through not only the characteristics of Anorexia nervosa, Bulimia Nervosa, Binge-eating Disease, but also through the psychological and physical harm these diseases leave on the body.

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

Brewerton, Timothy D. "Eating disorders, trauma, and comorbidity: Focus on PTSD." Eating disorders 15.4 (2007): 285-304.

My goal in becoming a clinical psychologist is to specialize in the field of eating disorders. After obtaining my PhD, I aspire to become a tenured faculty member at a research university, using my research and clinical training to enhance the understanding of the etiology, course, and treatment of eating disorders. As an established researcher, I will leverage my research by writing grants to address my research hypotheses and disseminate my findings in journals and conferences. Additionally, I seek to evaluate the efficacy of various treatments in hopes of constructing a comprehensive and holistic model of care that properly addresses every aspect of the individual and his/her disorder. Through this research, I hope to provide valuable contributions to the field and to become a more effective and empathetic clinician.

Western society tells girls they should be slim and petite whereas boys are supposed to be muscular and fit. While there are those who luckily could not care less about societal expectations, there are those who feel dangerous amounts of pressure to conform and fit to these external standards. In order to be slim or fit, many take drastic measures such as starving themselves or purging which can lead to the development of eating disorders. Many wonder, however, who is more likely to form eating disorders: males or females. While it is proven that unfortunately high numbers of females form eating disorders, some question the statistics of males with eating disorders and wonder if the comparative statistics are not nearly as skewed as thought

However, treatments are available for helping with eating disorders, but unfortunately, there is no cure. Eating disorders are prevalent and can only be cured by the individual. According to Treasure J, “Practice recommendations emphasize the importance of specialized care for the treatment of eating disorders, but such care is not often accessible” (587). I believe that raising awareness for eating disorders will help prevent the spreading and increasing of eating disorders. Many people are not intelligent when it comes to eating disorders and they all have different presumptions about this disorder. Eating disorders do not seem like a huge impact to people around the world but in reality, “Eating Disorders affect up to 24 million Americans

Physical exercise is inarguably healthy for the normal body functions as well as the overall good physical health. Consequently, many people take exercises to achieve the ultimate benefit of good health. However, a compulsive or compensatory need to take exercise could be an indicator of underlying problem of disordered eating habits. It pragmatic to monitor one’s exercising habits in order to increase chances of early detection of any underlying disordered eating habits.

Thirty million eating disorders exist in the United States (Get The, 2013). Thirty million people manipulate their caloric intake and exacerbate their workout regimens. However, this number fails to include the number of people who simply are at fault with their bodies. It does not encompass the number of women who hate their wide hips and the way their thighs gently brush as they climb through life. The statistic disregards the number of women who look in a mirror and are nauseated by what stares back at them. It forgets the number of women who simply do not honor their body as the temple that it is. The twenty-first century brought sweeping waves of technology and the construction of social media, but it brought edited photos, unrealistic

Stice, Shaw, & Marti (2006), in a meta-anaylsis, found that 51% of eating disorder prevention programs decrease the risks involved in developing eating disorders. They also found that 29% of eating disorder prevention programs decreased current or future irregularity in eating habits (Marti, 2006). This reveals how beneficial eating disorder prevention programs truly are in lessening the chances of an individual developing an eating disorder.

A relapse, simply put, is a period of deterioration after a period of recovery. Sometimes relapse creeps up on you over time while other times it seems to explode in your face and take over your life in one fell swoop. It can happen for a variety of reasons from boredom to grief, trauma, or any other trigger. The tricky part of relapse is that many people get used to these periods of deterioration and struggle, accepting that this is their ultimate reality while feeling completely defeated and powerless.