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