A vast amount of research has been done on the subject of eating disorders
and their causes. Many eating disorders have been proven to emerge during
adolescence and often serve as the foundations to more serious problems like
anorexia and bulimia. This essay will explore the development of eating
disorders in adolescent girls. It will show that these disorders are closely
connected to the biological and psychosocial changes that occur during the
adolescent period.
Many teen girls suffer with anorexia nervosa, an eating disorder in which girls
use starvation diets to try to lose weight. They starve themselves down to
skeletal thinness yet still think that they are overweight. Bulimia, meanwhile,
is a disorder in which young women binge on food and then force themselves to
vomit. They also often use laxatives to get food out of their system. All of
these young women who suffer from this problem are considered to suffer from a
psychiatric disorder. While the causes are debatable, one thing that is clear
is that these young women have a distorted body image. (Wolf, pp.214-216)
What is extremely alarming is that the current thin ideal for women in Western
society, which is unattainable for all but a very small percentage of the
population, is compounding this problem. It is a very serious issue when
someone\'s body shape is determined by genetic disposition and yet they try to
alter it to fit some kind of imaginary ideal of how a person should look.
Thus, one of the most serious problems is that female nature is not what
society says it should be. Some researchers theorize that anorexia is a young
woman\'s way of canceling puberty. Since they lack body fat, anorexics don\'t
get their periods and often lose their sexual characteristics such as public
hair. They remain, in other words, little girls. There is also the complex
issue of women feeling that by having an eating disorder they are finally in
control of something in their life. This may sound strange, but much research
has shown that women who have been abused or neglected in their childhoods
develop these problems of control. (Attie and Brooks-Gun, pp.70-71).
Studies suggest that eating disorders often begin in early to mid-adolescence.
They are directly connected to pubertal maturation and the increases in body
fat that occurs during this phase. These biological changes are associated with
increased dieting and unhealthy behaviours in early adolescence. This problem
is aggravated by various problems, including negative body image, which has a
close association with weight, perfectionism and depression. Family and
socialization also play significant roles. It has been found, for instance,
that mothers with girls with eating disorders are often critical of their
daughters\' weight and physical appearance. Families with adolescents who have
eating disorders are also often characterized by enmeshment,
overprotectiveness, rigidity and lack of conflict resolution. This is connected
to the \"control\" issue mentioned previously. Interestingly enough, girls
who are more involved in mixed-sex social activities and dating boys are also
more likely to exhibit disordered eating tendencies. (Attie and Brooks-Gun,
pp.70-71).
Thus, eating disorders must be studied in the context of what certain
individuals face during their developmental stage, or what they may have
suffered in childhood. In general, a combination of the pubertal phase of the
female body, the loosening of the individual\'s ties to parents, and the
development of a stable and cohesive personality structure play profound roles
in this process. Psychologists Ilana Attie and J. Brooks-Gun have done some
work on this issue. They considered eating disorders within the so-called
\"developmental\" perspective, which examines the emergence of eating
disorders in adolescent girls as a function of pubertal growth, body image,
personality development, and family relationships. The two psychologists
examined 193 white females and their mothers during the former\'s
middle-schooled years (13.93 years) and then two years later. They set out to
see how much the development of eating problems represented a mode of
accommodation to pubertal change. Taking a \"developmental\"
approach, the authors studied the impact of the pubertal transition relative to
other aspects of the female adolescent experience. (Attie and Brooks-Gun).
These researchers emphasized one very significant fact: that as girls mature
sexually, they accumulate large quantities of fat. For adolescent girls, this
growth in fat tissue is one of the most dramatic physical changes associated
with puberty, adding an average of 11 kg of weight in the form of body fat.
This increase in fat is, in turn, directly connected to desires to be thinner.
(Attie and Brooks-Gun, p.7O) This reality is due to the fact that, as Attie and
Brooks-Gun demonstrate, female body image is intimately bound up with
subjective perceptions of weight. Prepubescent girls who perceive themselves as
underweight are most satisfied while the opposite occurs for those who are
overweight or perceive themselves to be such. Thus, Attie and Brooks-Gun found
that dieting emerged as the female body developed, and that is was a function
of the body image transformation occurring at puberty. (Attie and Brooks-Gun,
p.71)
Aside from the pubertal changes that the authors found significant in this
issue, family relationships were also detected to influence the emergence of
eating disorders. Families that set high standards for achievement, gave little
support for autonomy, and blurred interpersonal boundaries left adolescent
girls with deficits in their self-esteem. (Attie and Brooks-Gun, p.71) Once
again, as mentioned earlier, it makes sense in a very complex way that young
girls who have been abused in this way end up \"controlling\" things
that are ultimately not good for them. For instance, a young girl who was made
to feel powerless in some ways in her family (i.e. sexual or physical abuse)
may end up feeling a sense of individual identity if she can
\"control\", for example, when she vomits and when she does not. Now,
at least, she can have control over something in her life.
Personality factors were also found to contribute to the development of eating
disorders. Characteristics such as perfectionist strivings, feelings of
ineffectiveness, depressive symptoms and self-regulatory deficits were seen
frequently in patients with eating disorders. (Attie and Brooks-Gun, p.71)
The authors found, for instance, that girls who early in adolescence felt most
negatively about their bodies were more likely to develop eating problems two
years later. (Attie and Brooks-Gun, p.76).
Thus, overall, Attie and Brooks-Gun found that eating problems emerged in
response to physical changes of the pubertal period. Personality variables
entered this problem, but only at a later stage. Attie\'s and Brooks-Gun\'s
findings suggest that body shape becomes a primary focus and that efforts to
control weight intensify during the middle-school years. In other words, the
rapid accumulation of body fat that is part of the female experience of puberty
often functions as a triggering effect, in the sense that it starts the attempt
of weight-loss diets.
Attie\'s and Brooks-Gun\'s study did, of course, have its limitations. The
authors themselves admitted that their investigation focused only on a sample
of white girls from upper-middle-class families. Yet most evidence has
suggested that bulimia nervosa is more prevalent in middle-and-upper middle
class white girls, although there is evidence suggesting that eating disorders
are increasing in other ethnic and social class groups, especially for girls
who experience more pressure to acculturate to white, middle-class standards.
(Graber, Brooks-Gun, Paikoff and Warren, p.823) In other words, what we see
here is that the values and ideals held by the dominant society