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 AmericasÐŽ¦ 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 womanÐŽ¦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 the most serious problems is that female nature is not what society says it should be. Some researchers theorize that anorexia is a young woman's way of canceling puberty (Attie and Brooks-Gun, pp.70-71). Since they lack body fat, anorexics don't get their periods and often lose their sexual characteristics such as pubic hair. They remain, in other words, little girls. There is also the complex issue of feeling that by having an eating disorder, women are finally in control of something in their life. This may sound strange, but a good deal of research has shown that women who have been abused or neglected in their childhoods develop these issues of dealing with control.

Consequently, eating disorders must be studied in the context of what these certain individuals faced during their developmental stage, or what they may have suffered in childhood. In general, a combination of the pubertal phase of the female body, the loosening of the individual's ties to parents, and the development of a stable and solid personality structure, play profound roles in this process. Psychologists Ilana Attie and J. Brooks-Gun have done extensive research on this issue. They considered eating disorders within the so-called "developmental" perspective, which examines the emergence of eating disorders in adolescent girls as a function of pubertal growth, body image, personality development, and family relationships. The two psychologists examined 193 white females and their mothers during the former middle-school years (13.93 years) and then two years later. They intended to see how much the development of eating problems represented a mode of accommodation to pubertal change. Taking a "developmental" approach, the authors studied the impact of the pubertal transition relative to other aspects of the female adolescent experience (Attie and Brooks-Gun).

These researchers emphasized one very significant fact: that as girls mature sexually, they accumulate large quantities of fat. For adolescent girls, this growth in fat tissue is one of the most dramatic physical changes associated with puberty, adding an average of 11 kg of weight in the form of body fat. This increase in fat is, in turn, directly connected to desires to be thinner (Attie and Brooks-Gun, p.7O). This reality is due to the fact that, as Attie and Brooks-Gun demonstrate, female body image is inevitably bound up with subjective perceptions of weight. Prepubescent girls who perceive themselves as underweight are most satisfied while the opposite occurs for those who are overweight or perceive themselves to be such. Thus, Attie and Brooks-Gun found that dieting emerged as the female body developed, and that is was a function of the body image transformation occurring at puberty (Attie and Brooks-Gun, p.71).

Aside from the pubertal changes that the authors found significant in this issue, family relationships were also detected to influence the emergence of eating disorders. Families that set high standards for achievement, gave little support for autonomy, and blurred interpersonal boundaries and left adolescent girls with deficits in their self-esteem (Attie and Brooks-Gun, p.71). Once again, as mentioned earlier, it makes sense in a very compound way that young girls who have been abused, end up "controlling" things that are ultimately not good for them. For instance, a young girl who was made to feel powerless in some way, (i.e. sexual or physical abuse) may end up feeling a sense of individual identity if she can "control", for example, when she vomits and when she does not, or when she just does not eat at all. Now, at least, she can have control over something in her life.

Personality factors were also found to contribute to the development of eating disorders. Characteristics such as perfectionist strivings, feelings of ineffectiveness, depressive symptoms and self-regulatory deficits were seen frequently in patients with eating disorders (Attie and Brooks-Gun, p.71). The authors found, for instance, that girls who early in their adolescence felt most negatively about their bodies were more likely to develop eating disorders two years later.

Thus, overall, Attie and Brooks-Gun found that eating disorders emerged in response to physical changes of the pubertal period. Personality variables entered this problem, but only at a later stage. Attie and Brooks-Gun's findings suggest that body shape becomes a primary focus and that efforts to control weight intensify during the middle-school years. And, the rapid accumulation of body fat that is part of the female experience of puberty often functions as a triggering effect, in the sense that it starts the attempt of weight-loss diets.

As a result, what we see here is