Eating Disorders
The Effects of Eating Disorders
On Adolescent and Young Adult Women
It is the purpose of this paper to discuss the effects anorexia and bulimia nervosa has on adolescent and young adult women in Americas¡¦ society today. I will explain the development of these eating disorders in adolescent girls and college-aged women. I will show that these disorders are closely connected to the biological and psychosocial changes that occur during these two periods of a woman¡¦s life.
A vast amount of research has been done on the subject of eating disorders and their causes. Many eating disorders have been proven to become visible during adolescence and often serve as the foundation to more serious problems like anorexia and bulimia. Some main reasons for these eating disorders to emerge are:
« Girls who were both sexually active with their boyfriends and in pubertal transition were the most likely to be dieting or engaged in disordered eating patterns (Caufmann, 1994).
« Girls who were making a lot of effort to look like same-sex figures in the media were more likely than their peers to become very concerned with their weight (Field & others, 2001).
« Also problems associated with negative body images, which have a close relation with weight, perfectionism and depression.
Many teen girls suffer from anorexia nervosa, an eating disorder in which girls use starvation diets to try and lose weight. They starve themselves down to skeletal thinness yet, still thinking they are overweight. Bulimia, however, is a disorder in which young women binge on food and then force themselves to vomit. They also often use laxatives to flush the food out of their system. All of these young women who suffer from these disorders are considered to suffer from a psychiatric disorder and while the causes are debatable, one thing is clear, these young women have a horribly distorted body image of themselves. One of...
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