I have read numerous shocking true-life stories focused around eating disorders. Every single article I read alarms me more than the last, and I can only hope the best for the girls recovering from the disease they are suffering from.
I have fortunately never suffered from an eating disorder, yet growing up I have been surrounded by friends that have encountered eating problems and that have even dealt with anorexia, and bulimia. This has encouraged me to not only grown up and understand about these problems and how to help your friends but to properly research the diseases in great depth. Knowing information about these diseases helped me understand why my friends and others where doing this to their bodies and how to help them deal with the illness.
Due to the recent ever-growing obsession with celebrities it is only natural for us to be obsessed with what they eat/don't eat and what exercise they do. Personally I think this huge influx of information on their diets and their image has increased teenagers vulnerability in what they look like, it has even lead to some teenagers developing problems with their eating, that may unfortunately extended to multiple eating disorders.
As previously mentioned here are only snippets of articles,the rest are in my project folder, yet I have included the titles and who they are written by, which i'm sure if you "google" will provide you with the full article.
If you would like to read other articles that are in my folder, get in contact with me and i'll happily try and put them up!
Further more i am constantly learning and expanding my project for my future career and personal interest, so if you have any data/knowledge/ dealt with an eating disorder and would like to share your experience with me get in touch.
Investigation: The truth about anorexia websites that helped drive a 13-year-old to suicide
By Rosie Boycott
Despair: Imogen D'Arcy hanged herself after becoming obsessed with her body
Can you imagine a website which gave you precise instructions as to how to set about getting cancer: smoke 60 a day, don’t exercise, eat loads of red fatty meat, make a point of ignoring any lumps that you might find in your breasts?
It would, I assume, be immediately shut down by the Department of Health.
But what about this — from a website dedicated to the promotion of anorexia, and which boasts of being the world’s largest site of its kind: ‘Okay, so today was going so well . . . I got to 3pm with only 200 cals, then I was practically forced to eat cake and stuff so as not to cause suspicion. Oh my God I’m at 800 cals. I hate this.’
Another girl offers a tip to curb your need to eat: ‘I love to eat ice.’
Yet another posting in the early afternoon, she tells her fellow anorexics: ‘So far, I have had a cup of tea, hoping to keep it that way.’
One more bemoans the arrival of her period: ‘I feel so bloated, water weight has added a devastating 1lb to 3lb.’
And so it goes on. Girls post pictures of themselves, bones protruding from skin like famine victims or survivors of death camps.
They adopt the poses of fashion models, their skinny arms held above their heads, their faces turned at fetching angles to the camera.
They’re smiling, but their smiles look to me like the smiles of terrified victims, trapped within their illness, frightened and scared.
Yet they claim to feel good, as one teen wrote on the website: ‘Yesterday I skipped dinner ... so I had about 250 calories. I’m gaining control. Yess.’
These, it emerged yesterday, are the kind of websites which had been visited regularly by Imogen D’Arcy, a 13-year-old girl from Leeds who hanged herself in despair that she was too ‘fat’ and ‘ugly’.
She had become so obsessed with her own body image that she had scoured the internet for information on anorexia and suicide in the weeks before her death.
Now, some people will argue that the desire for ultra-thinness is nothing new.
The fashion industry itself has long been criticised for using very skinny models and the Spanish government has actually legislated against the use of models with a Body Mass Index of under 18 (18.5 to 24.9 is deemed to be healthy), out of fear that making such extremes of thinness fashionable will lead insecure teenagers and young women towards anorexia or bulimia.
Sickening: Pictures of skeletal models glamorise anorexia on 'pro ana' websites
But compared with images I witnessed time and again on the internet as part of an investigation into these pro-anorexia websites, those infamous Calvin Klein adverts of Kate Moss in just her knickers, which led to the charge of ‘heroin chic’, seem positively benign.
By nature, anorexics tend to be isolated and lonely, they’re the odd ones out at school and among their social groups.
But now, thanks to networking sites such as Bebo, YouTube and Facebook, they can talk directly to each other, encouraging each other in their deadly aim of becoming as thin as is humanly possible.
Within the past year, YouTube was found to have 2,500 examples of chatrooms or groups, while the other social networking sites have thousands more.
One other pro-anorexia website attracts up to 112,000 hits a week and carries messages from including: ‘You will be FAT if you eat today. Just put it off one more day.’
It is hard to estimate the extent of the incidence of eating disorders in the UK, partly because any epidemiological investigation will be hampered by the reluctance of some of those affected to admit to the problem.
However, a typical GP list of 2,000 patients could expect to feature one or two anorexics and 18 patients with bulimia, many of whom (but by no means all) will be adolescent females.
The best estimates suggest that about one young woman in a hundred has bulimia nervosa and probably somewhat fewer have anorexia nervosa.
Around 90,000 are currently receiving treatment for some sort of eating disorder.
But these are strict medical diagnoses: recent reports estimate that there are literally tens of thousands of people whose lives revolve painfully around the issues of weight, eating and their control of what they eat.
Added together, the combined total for people — diagnosed and undiagnosed — with an eating disorder in the UK is an estimated 1.15million.
Studies show that anorexia is most likely to develop in girls aged between 10 and 19, and can lead to several complex and often lifelong health problems: osteoporosis (thinning bones), is a major one.
Women who have had anorexia are at risk of developing fractures spontaneously or following minor knocks and bumps.
One of the first complications of anorexia nervosa is a loss of periods. Treatment of the malnutrition usually reverses this problem but difficulties can remain.
Additionally, health complications such as heart, kidney and gastro-intestinal problems frequently occur and death often follows.
Dangerous message: This is a still of a video that was posted on YouTube
Indeed, anorexia nervosa has one of the highest rates of mortality for any psychiatric condition, estimated to run at around 13-20 per cent per annum.
What is deeply disturbing is that eating disorders have increased rapidly over the past 30 to 40 years and are now responsible for more loss of life than any other type of psychological illness.
So what is driving our young women towards this suicide wish? It is, in a large part, a desire for perfection and to look like one’s celebrity heroines.
Now, wanting to be slender in a world where the flip side of our chaotic and unhealthy relationship with food is the rising incidence of obesity, is no bad thing.
Until, that is, it tips over into anorexia, a life-threatening condition that is now being openly encouraged by these pernicious sites.
Such sites are so dangerous because they give a legitimacy to an illness which survives and thrives on secrecy.
On one internet page, I found a picture of a young girl, her rib bones standing out from her back like wooden stays, saying: ‘I can’t tell my mum that I haven’t eaten anything today.’
Surveys bear out the loneliness of the sufferer.
A recent report into 600 young people with eating disorders found that only one per cent of children felt they could talk to their parents about their eating-related concerns.
Meanwhile, 92 per cent of the children felt they couldn’t tell anyone at all — except that now they can tell other sufferers about their feelings on the social networking sites which have become central to the lives of millions of teens.
I once read an article about Jennifer Lopez’s diet regime which said she kept no food in the fridge.
She had her ‘calorie-controlled and balanced three meals a day’ sent in by courier so she ‘wouldn’t be tempted to raid the fridge when hunger pangs attacked’.
I remember my fury on reading it, not just because she was advocating a regime that it would be impossible for anyone on a normal salary to achieve, but also because at the time the daughter of a close friend of mine was struggling with anorexia.
Anna had just graduated: she was a pretty, bright 21-year-old, and her life seemed well set up for the future.
But boyfriend trouble came hot on the heels of a series of job rejections (her mum thought she probably came over as depressed) and Anna decided to diet.
She wasn’t by any means overweight — she wore a size 12 — but most of her friends were a little thinner, squeezing their slender hips into sizes 10s and 8s and Anna decided to emulate them.
Within two months, she’d lost 20lb, through a combination of furious workouts in the gym, early-morning runs of some five miles or so and never eating anything more than lettuce, unless her mother stood over, admonishing her like a child to ‘eat up her dinner’.
‘But what could I do,’ I remember her mother saying, sitting at my kitchen table in tears. ‘She’s 22 now, she’s an adult. I can’t make her eat.’
Horrific boast: Anorexic girls send in pictures of themselves to some sites
Anna’s weight dropped to 5 stone (she’s 5ft 4in) and she ended up in hospital. Thankfully, she’s now on the road to recovery, and this week I asked for her views on these websites. We scrolled through the list together.
There are messages such as: ‘Nothing tastes as good as thin feels.’
I’d heard this at WeightWatchers, where I do appear every so often when my weight goes over 10st 7lb and my doctor tells me that I should shift a few pounds.
That’s why I was particularly horrified to come across groups of ‘pro-ana’ members on one site participating in a perverse distortion of WeightWatchers.
Instead of accumulating points for food eaten, points are granted for restraint: a point for every day survived under 500 calories; 6 points for every day under 100 calories; 2 points for each diet pill. The points are gained during ‘group challenges’ aimed at losing weight before the dreaded summer holiday.
The language is lurid and chilling. For example, ‘only fat people are attracted to fat people’ and ‘bones are clean and pure and fat is dirty and hangs on your bones like a parasite’.
Further down on the same site, I found the saddest entry of all: ‘I believe in control, the only force to bring order to the chaos of my world. I believe that I am the most vile, worthless and useless person ever to have existed on this planet and that I am totally unworthy of anyone’s time and attention.’
This is a girl who needs her family’s love and possibly even access to psychiatric help. And yet she finds solace by reaching out to strangers on a site on which she will find only an encouragement to lose more weight.
‘I would have used these sites in the past if they were available then,’ Anna told me chillingly.....
Media is fuelling eating disorders, say psychiatrists | |||||
The Royal College of Psychiatrists is calling on the media to stop promoting unhealthy body images and "glamorising" eating disorders.
It says the media contributes to eating disorders, particularly among young people.
It wants to see people with more diverse body shapes represented by advertisers and the press, and calls for a new ethical editorial code.
But a magazine editor says teen magazines already act responsibly.
The Royal College of Psychiatrists criticises the media for using underweight models and airbrushing pictures to make models appear physically perfect.
It calls for an end to the use of underweight models.
It also proposes a kite mark scheme to signpost when an image has been digitally manipulated to make models appear more perfect.
Research evidence
Dr Adrienne Key from the Royal College of Psychiatrists' Eating Disorders Section said: "There is a growing body of research that shows the media plays a part in the development of eating disorder symptoms - particularly in adolescents and young people.
"Although biological and genetic factors play an important role in the development of these disorders, psychological and social factors are also significant.
"That's why we are calling on the media to take greater responsibility for the messages it sends out."
The psychiatrists are concerned that many magazine articles are unbalanced, giving advice about dieting without providing information about the dangers of extreme diets.
They also argue that articles which criticise the bodies of celebrities can make readers more dissatisfied with their own bodies.
Ethical code
The RCP wants the next government to set up a forum which includes politicians, advertising agencies, magazine editors, relevant regulatory bodies and eating disorder experts to draw up a new ethical editorial code.
Liberal Democrat MP, Jo Swinson, is putting down a parliamentary motion this week supporting the Royal College of Psychiatrists.
She said it was now "crystal clear that media does play a critical role in the development and maintenance of negative body image and eating disorders."
The eating disorder charity, beat, has launched a manifesto urging politicians to do more to help people with eating disorders.
Beat's chief executive, Susan Ringwood, said: "The media is a powerful influence and we know how vulnerable some people at risk of eating disorders can be to its visual images in particular.
"We know there is more that can be done to make that influence a positive one, and adopting the recommendations of the College's statement would be an important step."
'Powerful influence'
Dr Ian Campbell, a Nottingham GP and spokesman for the charity Weight Concern, said the way the media glamorised thinness made it harder for obese patients to lose weight.
"If you are heavy, reading magazines can diminish self-esteem.
"This can make it more likely that people may develop eating disorders."
But Annabel Brog, editor of the best selling teen magazine Sugar, said her magazine already acts responsibly and the statement from the Royal College of Psychiatrists was "incredibly frustrating" and "disheartening".
"We try so hard to be a positive influence on weight and body image.
"I would challenge anyone to look at Sugar over the last three years and try to find examples which could contribute to eating disorders."
Whilst welcoming the thrust of the recommendations, she thinks it would be impractical to put kite marks on pictures which had been digitally manipulated.
"It would be difficult to know where to draw the line.
"Often digital manipulation is used to brighten up the colours rather than to make the model look prettier or more perfect," she said.
| |||||
Teen media has been behaving responsibly for years 
No comments:
Post a Comment