MIrror Mirror On The Wall

17 Pages 4154 Words

change the image we see staring back at us. “I went on diets, I made restrictions for foods I could and couldn’t eat, I even starved myself, also some days I would eat so much food then I threw up; just so I felt better about myself” (interview four). When people go beyond the usual diet or starving of themselves it turns into an eating disorder. Eating disorders are an extreme expression of weight and food issues. Eating disorders involve serious disturbances in eating behaviors, such as extreme and unhealthy reductions of food intake or severe amounts of food eaten, as well as all the feelings of distress or extreme concern about body shape or weight. They bring an irrational fear of fat, a strong desire to become thin, and a dissatisfaction feeling of their body. Eating disorders have a complex range of issues that go along with it; they are emotional, familial, cultural, and biological elements. People who suffer from them will have a second voice, words that play over and over in their head that they can't seem to get rid of; they hear these voices from the second they wake up in the morning, haunting them all day, until they go to sleep at night. ”I hated looking in mirrors, but some reason I always walked by one and I always heard a voice telling me I was so fat, and looked awful in everything I wore” (interview three). People with eating disorders have certain patterns of eating that take on a life of their own and they can’t help it or control it after it has already started. Eating disorders are serious emotional problems that are life- threatening. They are real, treatable medical illnesses, if the people with the disorders let other people help them. Two of the more common eating disorders are anorexia nervosa and bulimia nervosa.

Eating disorders affect five to ten million American teenage girls and women and about one million American teenage boys and men. It is so sad to think that an estimate of 70 mil...