Kunwar 1
Rajni Kunwar
Kate Kimball
English –
April 10th 2013
Anorexia Nervosa

There may be mumbles about that girl who only fixes herself a salad with only vinegar at dining services or suspicious glances at someone who spends an hour on the treadmill and then switches to the stair stepper at the rec. On-campus eating disorders are talked about everywhere and yet are not really talked about at all. There is observation, concern, and gossip, but hushed conversation and larger scale efforts to help and change never seem to earn public attention.
There is this girl that I grew up and graduated high school with. I talked to her almost every day at school, but we were never that close. I never saw much of her over the summer except when she was out running after a two to three hour for basketball practice. At my holidays when I was back home about three or four ago, I saw this girl. She was so thin it was almost disgusting. Her skin was pale, her hair was thin, and I could see her ribs through her shirt. She went from looking healthy and physically fit to looking sick and fragile. People need to pay more attention to this disease. Anorexics are literally dying to be thin. Why is this, many wonder? It is because society’s obsession with being thin has driven this desire over the verge of insanity to where it is now all people can think about. Most of you probably already know what anorexia is, however in case you don't anorexia is basically a disease involving self-starvation. Anorexia victims have a very low "ideal" weight.
It might begin as a normal diet carried to extremes, reducing their food intake to a bare minimum. According to the Monographs of the Society for Research in Child Development
(MSRCD) about fasting girls (“History and research society development”), Anorexia a socio cultural matter. It is a very serious eating disorder that develops when one decides to stop eating. Kunwar 2 Many have differing opinions when it comes to stating why and how this problem has evolved.
Some feel as though society has played the impact for this occurrence. Others, however, feel as though subconscious factors are the reasoning. The teenage population all the way up to young women today ages 13-22 have been constantly burdened with the pressures to stay thin for most of their teenager’s lives. Does society play a key role in causing these pressures? I think yes. In today’s society, when one talks of beauty, physical appearance is most always included. Why has our youth come to this? Whatever happened to beauty is only skin deep? Individuals have become so obsessed with body image that they have forgotten the true meaning of happiness. As a teenage girl of today’s society, I believe that anorexia should be considered solely socio culturally developed rather than containing so called “biological factors” because of numerous issues that play a major role in anorexia’s development such as Hollywood, family abuse, and career success. Biological factors should not be a reason for the development of anorexia. Although experiments have been done and discoveries have been made, this doesn’t answer the question as to why this problem has sky rocketed within these last couple of decades. “Researches and scientists have done testing’s on victims with anorexia and have said to have found genes that contain similarities with anorexia on chromosome one”, (Biological causes of Anorexia).
Although this experiment and discovery seem valid when read, one must realize that the genes that were discovered to link with anorexia are not in any way evidence that there is or are any specific genes that cause this disease to develop; there was simply a similarity that was found. It is impossible to say that one or many genes are the cause for anorexia’s development. If this were the case, individuals would stop eating at ages other than the norm. Children would stop
eating