African Americans Can Develop Eating Disorders, Part Two

The first part of this article focused on defining eating disorders. The focus of this second installment is to talk about how eating disorders affects African Americans.

When you think of eating disorders you usually don’t think about African Americans. Even within the culture the idea of being too skinny is something a lot of us are not concerned about. Some of the reasons why we think this way are:

1- Black males and females have less restrictive, less narrow definitions of what makes a woman beautiful especially when it comes to how much a women weight.

2- Most black do not consider extremely skinny, underweight women to be more beautiful.

3- Knowing that most black males do not find excessively thin or anorexic looking women attractive, black women are usually more satisfied and more self-confident than white women when it comes to their weight.

4- Black female are judged less often than whites on the basis of how much they weight and more often on the basis of factor such as skin shade, the “right” kind of nose or lips and “good” hair. http://www.findarticles.com/cf_0/m0FCR/3...

5- Most black girls are happy with their size (70 percent of black teens).

6- Black girls cited the curvaceous actresses on the popular TV, as having favorable form. (Yancey, 1996)

Even those some research shows than some African Americans women are not concerned about their weight there is a growing number of African American women who are suffering form eating disorders.

When I was researching this topic what I found was that there is not much research on this idea. The research out their shows that “as black women exposure to white society steadily increases through television, jobs in corporate America, integrated neighborhoods and the expanding black middle class, dieting and fear of fat are gaining fast footholds in the black community.” (Edut, 1996).

The most common form of eating disorder that African American women are suffering from is binge eating (or compulsive overeating) disorders. Finding about African Americans and binge eating shows that:

35 percent between ages 35-44 are obese

50 percent between ages 44-55 are obese (Crews, 1999)

A study is being conducted by the National Institutes of Health to study the idea of African Americans women and eating disorders. Some of the findings so far show that four percent of the women in the study reported have binge eating disorder. One percent reported having bulimia and less than one percent reported to have anorexia. (Washington, 1997).

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