Eating Disorder Essay

This is an essay I wrote for my English class to create more awareness on the dangerousness of eating disorders. Read and comment! (:


About fifty percent of Americans know a family member or friend with an eating disorder, and of those Americans, 95 percent of them are between the age of fifteen and twenty five. The three most common eating disorders are Bulimia Nervosa, Binge Eating Disorder, and Anorexia Nervosa. When you are Bulimic, you binge-eat and then purge. When you have a Binge Eating disorder, you eat unhealthy amounts of food at once and a lot of times are unable to stop. When you are Anorexic, you starve yourself by hardly eating any food for a long duration of time. Some people say that the cause of having an eating disorder is because they have depression, anxiety, or anger. Others think that it's because they feel lack of control in life or they feel influenced by the media. Those may be true, but the most important factor is because of teasing and low self-esteem issues.

There are a lot of factors involved with developing an eating disorder. In some cases, they might have some type of emotional issue, such as depression, anxiety, or anger. For example, if someone is going through a lot of anxiety or depression, they might relieve the stress by this approach. Others may try bingeing or purging because they feel pressured by their parents to be perfect, and they feel that the only thing they can control is their weight. Another big issue is that many girls are influenced by the media, such as beauty magazines, TV, and celebrities. Some girls look at beauty magazines and see models that are unusually skinny, and think they should look like them. This can eventually result in an eating disorder. The same thing goes for celebrities and TV. When a girl sees an advertisement on TV showing a celebrity that had lost a lot of weight and is really slim, that also might influence them to lose a lot of weight fast, which again, can result in an eating disorder.

Although those are possible factors, the main factor is because of teasing and low self-esteem. A lot of people that are overweight get teased about it. In fact, I have a friend that gets made fun of all the time by a boy who calls her 'a fat tub of lard'. He is not the only one who makes fun of her, so are all of his friends by laughing along with him. Because there is not one, but many people making fun of her, it makes it more traumatizing. That creates low self-esteem, which leads to a whole different issue. When people have low self-esteem, they tend to be more vulnerable to insults and other people's opinions affecting them. For instance, I used to have really low self-esteem. I have been working on it a lot, so it's not as bad as it used to be. But before, it was awfully bad. When I had a really low self-esteem, a lot more things affected me than they used to. When people teased me, it had a bigger impact on me than it does now. As a result, I started to think that some of the things that people were saying were true, one of those included being fat. It was torture every day having such low self-esteem that I dreaded going to school because I thought I was as bad as people said I was. I thought that a lot of people hated me. This is a HUGE cause for eating disorders. Another example of someone having low self-esteem is one of my mom's friends. She had such low self-esteem, she turned anorexic and almost died because of it. She finally overcame her low self-esteem and thus stopped those unhealthy habits.

Eating disorders are horrible disorders and are very difficult to overcome. The causes of eating disorders vary, but they can all be equally dangerous. Hence, if you know someone that you suspect might be struggling with an eating disorder, tell someone immediately.