Eating Disorders in the News
© Heather Mudgett.
In January, HealthCentral.com ran a ReutersNews article. The article discussed a recent study of bulimics, which found that bulimics are more apt to binge/purge in the morning and when alone. (ok, ok, maybe the binging alone thing isn't much of a newsflash, is it?). You'll find the entire article at http://www.healthcentral.com/news/Health...
MSNBC's Linda Carrol wrote a terrific article titled "Healthy Eve: The pursuit of physical perfection". She writes "It's become fashionable these days to deride the emaciated model look that is currently held up as the ideal for us women. But are we really getting the joke?" I encourage you to read this article at http://www.msnbc.com/news/522381.asp?bt=...
Susan Alexander Yates, the mother of twin college age girls, writes about her conerns with eating disorders in teens and young women. "After our twins, Susy and Libby, finished their first semester at different colleges a few years ago, I asked them about the biggest challenge they'd faced as Christians on campus. To my surprise, it wasn't encountering the parties, casual sex, or agnostic professors. It was seeing the number of girls struggling with an eating disorder." Read her entire article at http://www.christianitytoday.com/tcw/200...
HealthScout reporter Nicolle Charbonneau reports on a disorder of sorts, which is becoming increasingly common among male bodybuilders. Apparently, "despite their bulging muscles, a small subset of bodybuilders remain convinced they're still scrawny, and that distorted view can make pumping iron their life's focus, to the exclusion of family and work. They have a disorder called muscle dysmorphia or bigorexia." Read her whole report at http://www.healthscout.com/cgi-bin/WebOb...
Also at HealthCentral.com, is an article reporting that even pre-pubescent girls are now being influenced by advertisers, the media, and hollywood to be thin and beautiful. "Bombarded by media images of rail-thin celebrities and preyed upon by advertisers who use these images to set cultural standards of beauty, many girls are already veterans of the war on body fat by the time they reach puberty. But teaching girls as young as age 10 about the media's influence on body image and self-esteem and helping them find ways to resist these images may lead them to accept their bodies and themselves, researchers suggest." This article can be found at http://www.healthcentral.com/News/NewsFu..."
Courtney Thorne-Smith, the former star of Ally McBeal, told US Weekly in December that the pressure to be thin ultimately led her to quit the Fox dramedy. "I started undereating, overexercising, pushing myself too hard and brutalizing my immune system," the 33-year-old actress says. "The amount of time I spent thinking about food and being upset about my body was insane." Read this article at
