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Contributing Factors to the Development of Eating Disorders Christa Parrish
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his ‘precious’ body, the very same that is hooted and honked at, demeaned both in daily life as well as in ever existing forms of media, harassed, molested, raped, and, if all that wasn’t enough, is forever poked and prodded and weighed and constantly wrong for eating too much, eating too little, a million details which all point to the solitary girl, to EVERY solitary girl, and say: Destroy yourself. – The Asylum for Wayward Victorian Girls, Emilie Autumn To live with an eating disorder is to live in constant bilateral antipathy, the brain and the body never quite agreeing. What do you do when the most basic human necessity is something intensely feared? You fight, even if you are fighting for the wrong thing. The history of eating disorders is as loose and undefined as the disorder itself. Anorexia nervosa became a recognized disorder in the 1870s, but the public was generally unaware of it until 1974, when popular media began to feature stories starring women who refused to eat. In the 1980s, anorexia became familiar enough such that Saturday Night Live, among other comedy acts, began picking fun at the disorder, coining jokes without regard to those affected. The public began to take the disorder lightly, finding it comical when skits and TV shows employed the stereotype of the anorexic girl in a wealthy household. “You look anorexic,” became a commonly used hyperbolic exchange between women (Brumberg 8). A full understanding of eating disorders did not occur until the 1990s. The thin ideal, which is the demand that all women must conform to a certain socially acceptable size, is not a new concept. People, specifically women, have historically tried to conform to their generation’s idea of physical attractiveness (Wiseman et al.). The belief that women should conform to a certain standard is not only present in a scale of attractiveness, but in the means of imposed size. Women are expected to be less than men, and this is not just in physical stature, but in and as their existence. Eating disorders are now becoming understood as an intersection of interdisciplinary factors. These factors can be divided into two main outcomes: dysfunction in neuronal processes related to appetite and emotionality, and the interactions between cognitive, socioemotional, and interpersonal processes (Riva 1). When analyzing the neurocognitive and sociocultural factors contributing to eating dis-
orders, one discovers that society exacerbates what biology incubates.
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eurocognitive factors mandate the way humans function. Humans operate on the basis that every action they perform is a consciously made choice, but based on biological principle, choices are determined by anatomical structure and basal neurological physiology. Obsessive compulsive disorder, whether full-blown or in small manifestations, is a common symptom in those diagnosed with eating disorders. Why then, “do not all individuals with either obsessive compulsive features or with a dysfunctional scheme for self-evaluation develop an ED? What is the role of the body experience in the etiology of these disorders?” (Riva 1) Discrepancies at the neurocognitive level—outlined as cognitive aberrations and body dissatisfaction—offer an increased understanding of why the eating disordered mind operates in its way. Cognitive aberrations are primary causal factors for eating disorders. As being a consistent aberration found in diagnosed patients, obsession often allows the eating disordered patient a sense of comfort in their food-centered cognition. In individuals with eating disorders, patients are most generally found to “have obsessive traits such as counting calories, food verifications, ritualized feeding. In fact, many studies showed that obsessive-compulsive personality and disorder are found in excess in patients with anorexia nervosa” (Gorwood 165). Individuals diagnosed with eating disorders spend a large portion of time obsessing about food, eating, weight, shape, or other directly correlated matters. Sixty-seven percent of patients self-reported that they had no time free of obsessive thoughts, with seventy-two percent of these patients actively attempting to suppress the obsessive thoughts. Of this seventy-two percent, “50% were not successful and felt that they had little or no control over the preoccupations” (Polivy and Herman 200). A small majority of patients, chiefly restrictive anorexics, found the obsessive thoughts comforting, much like that of a mean of self-regulation (Polivy and Herman 200). This lends the thought that those diagnosed with an eating disorder have an undefinable but established foundation of rigid thought patterns. Rigid thought is similar to obsession in a way such that if a certain principle is ignored or not followed, relative diFifth World
