Media's Influence On Eating Disorders

The scientific world is aware of eating disorders in all its forms. I find it unfair that media alone is to blame, we all have been exposed to those favorable body images, but the fun fact those body images changes many times, we went from liking the curvy to featherweight, back to curvy and now media is promoting the acceptance of all body types. So, media alone can not be the only contributing factor in eating disorders. In my opinion, many other factors should be considered such as culture, heredity, peer pressure and brain function. I come from a culture that never promoted a skinny model type of body image, on the contrary, a woman with extra meat on her bones was always considered of immense beauty. Our not very far neighbors in Mauritania, …show more content…
The first one, was Portuguese and had five other sisters, a very tough mother and they were all very critical of her weight gains and were not accepting of her, and that is why she started starving herself or purging after every meal, sadly enough, after getting married and having a child, her condition persisted and she only stopped when her daughter developed the same eating disorder and she never was exposed to the same critiques that her mother was exposed to, unfortunately, both of them have had health complications that they need to live with till today. My other friend is a gymnast who told me about suffering from binge-eating back in 2002, she actually advised me to try it too, because I was more on the chubby side. She did it to maintain a body weight that will help her stay in the team because as she said “you gain weight you do not make the team” after I met her mother I noticed that she was extremely skinny, and my friend confessed that even her mother is anorexic although she was never into sports. I don’t know about you, but it seems to me that those disorders can be attributed to heredity