Social Network. Eating Disorders. Literature & Language Essay

EATING DISORDERS
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1 Describe how eating disorders can be viewed as multi-determined disorders.’
Anorexia may be viewed as a multidetermined disorder with individual, family and possible cultural predisposing factors. Eating disorders are multifactorial and they are triggered by different things amongst people who have to experience them. Some eating disorders are triggered by the desire to have the ‘standard’ weight which in some societies is promoted by the media. For example, anorexia nervosa amongst adolescent girls can be attributed to the cultural imposition that slender and thin girl body shape is fashionable and epitomizes beauty. The desire to achieve the ‘perfect’ body as depicted by the media drives them to bulimia and anorexia. The positive correlation of the advent of social media where adolescents are exposed to the ‘standard cultural definition’ of the perfect body has increased cases of eating disorders as more people chase it. It is also generally found that some eating disorders such as anorexia nervosa is most prevalent in post-industrialized, high-income countries than in low- and middle-income countries.
Eating disorders can also be attributed to anxiety disorders mostly developed during childhood. Individuals who have anxiety disorders or display obsessional traits in childhood are at increased risk of developing anorexia nervosa. Occupations such as modeling and athletics can also cause an increased risk of eating disorders specifically anorexia nervosa. The environment is also a contributory factor. Individuals who experience sexual or physical sexual abuse are at an increased risk of developing bulimia nervosa. Thus, all the aforementioned factors show that eating disorders are multi-determined and proper diagnosis and evaluation of the individual is important to ensure that the most effective intervention procedure is applied.
2 Describe the reasons why dieting usually precedes binge eating (in other words, describe how dieting can lead to binge eating).
Dieting leads to binge eating by promoting cognitive regulated eating style at the expense of a physiological style. The dieting process transforms the individual to see eating food from a cognitive perspective and therefore becomes vulnerable to disinhibition. The physiological defense of body weight is overcome by the newly adopted cognitive regulated eating style. Thus, in a case where the body would have inhibited more eating, the body fails to pull the trigger in the brain of the individual and the person continues eating. The natural balance of the communication system of the body ‘having been abused’ by dieting is unable to inhibit the individual from consuming more food. Cognitive control of food intake is disrupted and they fall to binge eating. This is not surprising because it seems only natural for people who binge to diet afterward in order to compensate for their excessive eating. Thus, people who diet at times have to compensate by binge eating to meet their body shape expectations when they feel they may have over dieted.
The proposition that dieting precedes binge eating is supported by the primary characteristic of nearly half of anorexic patients who are super-dieters but th...