Post 4: Anorexia and Today’s Modern Standards

Be aware of eating disorders.

Living healthy is a must, and is something that’s highly encouraged. As a person who prefers to eat for pleasure –especially if sweets and desserts--, I think this trait is something to be admired. Add the fact that in every street corner there’s no of shortage of fast food restaurants, it really is something.

But of course, like everything else, there’s always some sort of downside to it. I don’t mean living healthy, I mean the envy and attitude towards it goes into the extreme. Of course, with all the pressures of society on people with excess weight have a symbolic meaning of greediness and gluttonous self-indulgence, many people would think the opposite of it is good. Add the fact with all the glamor of those thin supermodels we see on fashion shows and commercials, then there’s this sort of insecurity that makes people –particularly, women—feel awful about their current image.

 

Anorexia nervosa is an eating disorder where the food restriction goes into unhealthy, and along with it is the fear of gaining weight. It’s more prevalent in Western society, though I’m quite sure there’s also no lack of it here in our country.  It is not, as most people think, a loss of appetite. A person with this specific disorder certainly feels appetite, but has an addiction to fasting to lose weight. Along with it come the metabolic and hormonal disorders, as well as the distorted self-image.

According to an article by Dr. Emily T. Tronscianko, who had first-hand experience with Anorexia herself, details about how society’s warped view of thinness and beauty can affect people into Anorexia with all the disapproval with fat people, the admiration for people very thin people, especially in the fashion industry’s models can affect us.

“I knew that if the world as we knew it ended and I was still anorexic, I'd be crippled by anger at myself, by regret and by the deepest imaginable sadness that I'd insisted on refusing to eat when there was enough. When I then did start to eat more again, a couple of years later, I cried too, because it felt so beautiful and so awful that any food I wanted was there, waiting for me, and that I could choose anything I wanted to make myself better again: an unholy privilege, to say no to food for so many years, and then to have it all there for the taking as soon as I got over that perversion born, at least in part, of over-privilege.”

With the rise of ‘pro-ana’ websites, as well as the harsh view society has, it’s definitely nothing to laugh about. And with all the things I’ve witnessed with people who even long to have anorexia definitely says something about today’s society. The warped image society has on beauty and standards affect our vision of perfection and what’s good and what’s not good. Even if one can say their honest opinion about the negative effects media may glorify, the majority’s opinion will still win out.