How Family and Society Can Play a Role in Exacerbating Eating Disorders

Unfortunately in our society today, eating disorders are becoming more and more a prevalent existence in the lives of our youth. It is estimated that there are more than 8 million women afflicted with eating disorders in the US alone and many of these are young girls. The push for beauty and the “thin is beautiful” mentality has led many women to try to mimic the looks of movie stars and magazine models often with disastrous results. These young impressionable women want so badly to be accepted as beautiful in our society that they often go to incredible lengths to get results. This can include trying various diets, forced vomiting, and even taking drugs such as diuretics to achieve what they think is the pinnacle of beauty, but in reality it's thin and sickly.

Because of this overall acceptance that thin women are sexy women, even families can play a role in helping to exacerbate the problem of eating disorders that exist in our society. Some parents, although well-meaning, may make comments to their children about their eating habits or how they may look in general. A young person is emotionally vulnerable as it is and often has self-esteem issues as they begin going through the changes of puberty that is the normal process of turning into adults. These awkward stages may be completely normal but because of their fragile emotional states, any issues having to deal with self worth or their place in society can greatly be compounded by what they think others think of them. It may simply be a comment about how their daughter's clothes are fitting or perhaps how much food they had at dinner that sets the stage for worse things to come.

Some women begin by trying to enter into exercise programs to lose excess weight and begin working out at a feverish pace to try to achieve results. Because many of these women have never had true experience with a healthy diet and exercise program they may not get the desired results they wanted and this can lead them to try to add other things to their regimen to speed up the weight loss. This can mean forced starvation or even ingesting diet pills to help the process along. Still other women may take part in what is known as binging and purging where they will eat thousands of calories and then force themselves to vomit so that they don't experience any weight gain from these episodes. All of these practices are incredibly harmful and can lead to serious health implications that can result in hospitalization, or even death in the worst cases.

It is important to realize that young women, or any individuals for that matter, that may have self-esteem issues need to be handled with care. They may not rationalize others' statements but instead may see them as much more meaningful than they were intended. If you suspect that your children or those of your friends may be exhibiting any of the symptoms above, it is important that you take action and seek help immediately before the condition worsens and leads this young person to seriously damage their health, perhaps even permanently.