Christa Parrish

Contributing Factors to the Development of Eating Disorders

“T 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 disorders, one discovers that society exacerbates what biology incubates.

Neurocognitive 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 di

saster ensues. Rigid thinking patterns in eating disordered patients do not allow for flexibility in perception or alteration in dysregulated cognition. Benowitz-Fredericks et al. state that, “Some adolescents develop dichotomous thinking patterns that can lead to eating disorders” (694) These dichotomous thinkings manifest a type of hysteria; the mind restructures itself to think one of two ways, and anything in between is a gross detriment. “Individuals with this type of thinking believe that higher-order goals, such as happiness, are unattainable without first reaching-lower order goals, such as losing weight” (Benowitz-Fredericks et al. 694). The symptoms of obsession and rigid-thought can develop at any point in life, but their causes are best explained by the principle of embodied cognition.

Embodied cognition is defined as the central role of the body influencing the mind. The body acts in three ways: as regulator, as distributor, and as constraint. The body regulates cognitive activity over space and time, solidifying that cognition and action are coordinated. The body distributes data between neural and non-neural structures, and the body restrains the nature and content of representations of this data as it is processed by the cognitive system (Riva 2). As our perceptions form and bodies interact with the space around us, a small dysregulation can increase in magnitude. With age comes responsibility, increased pressure, and increased stimulation over all aspects of life; a dysregulation in foundational processes will be destructive as the patient becomes integrated in society.

If these dysregulations are not addressed and are integrated, they can result in a complete lack of internal awareness. This inability to accurately identify personal states and/or feelings can be especially dangerous when regarding those diagnosed with, or with the heritable potential to develop, an eating disorder. Further theorization relates that “such faulty learning undermines trust in one’s body and increases the need to control both the body and the self” (Polivy and Herman 204). These processes lead, in whole or in part, to general body dissatisfaction.

Body dissatisfaction (BD) is the most dominating factor in analyzing the cognition of eating disorders. BD mandates self-perception; low BD is incontrovertibly associated with the incidence of eating disorders. While social factors influence perception, which creates BD, the current analysis is more concerned with why a mind harmfully influenced by the thin ideal turns to it.

Body dissatisfaction is a main factor contributing to the development of an eating disorder (ED), but it is by no means mandatory. Most causes of EDs can be produced by BDs due to media, family, and peer interactions. “Media influence is thought to precipitate EDs by making women feel dissatisfied with their appearance” (Polivy and Herman 192). In tandem with this, Polivy and Herman also concluded that, “Family and peer pressure, teasing, and more individual psychological influences such as general anxiety converge on the ‘final common pathway’ of BD” (Polivy and Herman 192). This raises the question: what separates people? Does or does not the affected capitalize on weight and body shape as a means of self-regulation of their misconstrued identity or control?

I have already noted that many precursors for BD are perfectionism, life satisfaction, current anxiety, and body mass index (BMI) (Ferguson et al.). Life satisfaction has many fluid variables such as age, depressive symptoms, perceptions of parental love, peer competition, and social media use. While BMI is a determinant of body satisfaction, “higher BMIs do not necessarily associate with body dissatisfaction in all girls” (Ferguson et al.).

In addition to these identified factors, there are other theories as to why some individuals react to harmful perceptions about themselves. Riva argues that the development of BD “is strictly related to two different processes: the acquisition of advanced allocentric spatial memory abilities and the emergence of autobiographical memory” (6). The allocentric memory, defined as the personally objectified body, develops simultaneously with the sense of self-narrated memory. This leads to the integration of body image through the contrast of the self with the social ideal body. Based upon this theory, body dissatisfaction is not predetermined but developed over time through socially orchestrated cognition.

There is a “societal disparagement of overweight and glorification of underweight,” thus causing young women to express dissatisfaction with their bodies (Polivy and Herman 191). Once this dissatisfaction surpasses an unmanageable threshold the individual begins to refocus attention to weight, shape, and eating to gain emotional control. Anorexia nervosa lends to partial gratification through avoiding food to achieve the unattainable label of slim, while bulimia nervosa grants relief through bingeing and purging. This now defines an eating disorder as a convoluted mean of emotional regulation and body dissatisfaction as a metric.

In Emotion Dysregulation, Self-Image, and Eating Disorder Symptoms in University Women, Linehan discusses his bio-psychosocial model of emotion dysregulation. This model describes emotion dysregulation as a “transaction process between individual emotional vulnerabilities and invalidating responses from the social and family environment” (2), with individual emotional vulnerabilities being broken down into “emotional sensitivity, reactivity, and time needed to recover from emotional events” (2) as well as directly physical factors such as sleeping patterns, physical health, and diet among others.

Essentially, malformed emotional regulation creates a vicious cycle of vulnerability and invalidation. This applies directly to eating disorders for those with deregulatory emotional conservation have lowered abilities to identify and describe emotion, and in some cases, the disorder encourages negative behavior: “Binge eating, with or without subsequent purging, provides distraction from or amelioration of painful inner states, negatively reinforcing the behavior”

(Monell et al. 2). Malformed emotional regulation leads to higher instances of body dissatisfaction. In the case of bulimia nervosa, the individual restricts or binges and purges to achieve an emotional release of some sort (Polivy and Herman 197). The race against time to achieve the “perfect” body becomes an existential project: without the continuous battle, life has no meaning, coherence, or emotional fulfillment. The focus on weight makes life definite and simple. If any sense of inadequacy is present, identifying oneself through weight serves as a “maladaptive solution” (Polivy and Herman 197). Cases where the loop is broken induce severe loss of control.

“Bruch defined [anorexia nervosa] as a ‘struggle for control, for a sense of identity, competence, and effectiveness’” (Polivy and Herman 201). Focus on weight, loss of weight, and any association thereof provides a means by which an identity can be fabricated to elude the dealing with true emotional issues. “Gaining a sense of control and pride in one’s ability to control one’s eating combats the feeling of being taken over by thoughts of food or lacking control of one’s thoughts, eating, and weight” (Polivy and Herman 204). The loss of control leads individuals diagnosed with eating disorders to feel fatter and more pessimistic; thus, Froreich contends that an eating disorder is a “desperate attempt to compensate for an underlying sense of ineffectiveness and lack of control”.

This lends that a definable cause of an eating disorder would be a perceived lack of control in one’s life. Ineffectiveness and fear of losing self-control are the largest predictors of EDs (Froreich et al.). Most patients recall that their dieting began when they perceived life to be out of their immediate control, so they rationalized controlling food intake as a viable solution (Froreich et al.). These unhealthy behaviors are “functional within the context of the patient’s belief system” (Riva 1), and they allow for an overarching sense of well-being. Outside of the internal monologue, though, there are factors that have a significant influence.

Culture develops perceptions about the body; this is a fact backed by ages of communal living. Paul Schilder states that, “There exists a deep community between one’s own body-image and the body-image of others.” Society as a collective is programmed to conform to a general ideal physical form. The “body schema,” or innate body model, allows for an understanding of how one’s own existence is separated from the outside world; the innate body model defines how individuals perceive the world around them. Essentially, the body is experienced through different neural representations that are not at all connected to legitimate physical appearance (Riva 6). Bodily perceptions are created in part by societal input, meaning that while neurocognitive factors mandate the basic function, no scientific artifact presents pathology unless exacerbated by societal influence.

While neurological factors mandate internal processes, sociocultural factors temper the external processes, which in persistence and development of negative media influences and cultural standards, have the potential to form eating disorders. Media has many different forms, but for the scope of this paper social media, television, and magazines are of most interest. It should be noted that even though eating disorders in males are not irrelevant, the scope of this paper cannot address them because of the starkly different nature they possess (Peterson, Paulson, and Williams 695).

Media create an environment where all are forced to value body shape, be it other’s or their own; through weaving an intricate “web of pressures and experiences” (Leavy and Ross 68) that culminate in an “intense and ritualistic focus” on the body, young women come to idolize “the cultural ideal female body, which is much thinner than what a healthy woman should look like according to the medical industry” (Leavy and Ross 66).

Social media correlates highly with increased body dissatisfaction, peer competition, and reinforcement of disordered eating. Increased social media usage, namely Facebook, is directly linked to decreased opinion of self; through analysis it has been found that the number of friends and time spent on social media positively correlated with increased body dissatisfaction (Mabe, Forney, and Keel). “Facebook intensity, online physical appearance comparison, and online fat talk were significantly and uniquely associated with disordered eating” (Walker et al. 157), while that the time spent on Facebook was positively associated with increased body image dissatisfaction, engagement in appearance comparison, and risk for eating disorders (Cohen and Blaszczynsk 9). Facebook represents the merging of two influential social factors: the media and the peer, thus, it produces new forms of peer competition mediated by the visceral image.

Negative influences are created indirectly through peer competition via social media. This does not exist across all media, but Ferguson et al. found that peer competition, not television or social media exposure, leads to negative influences. When defined as an arena for competition, social media was found to prerequisite negative outcomes. This competitive phenomenon seems dependent on culture for negative influences were found in a higher frequency in highly educated women, women who had acculturated more to the majority culture, and women who were white and Hispanic. The creation of unhealthy peer competition, though, is not the only detrimental use of social media.

Television and magazines, as a primary source of entertainment and information for much of the world’s urban population, reinforce the problematic thin-ideal. With frequently repeated exposure to television displaying those who are of below average weight, chronic self-awareness and concern over outside perception causes depression and anxiety to which disordered eating serves as a sense of relief. For as many instances as the media refutes eating disorders, there exists a subliminal glorification two-fold greater in magnitude. Whatever positive effect they were trying to

achieve, the opposite is produced. The average young woman is “surrounded by images of thin women, and she knows that all women don’t look like Christina Aguilera, but her subconscious registers her own body type as being something other than beautiful” (Collins 2).

The self-discrepancy theory (SDT) as postulated by Harrison states that “body-specific self-discrepancies would mediate a relationship between media exposure and disordered eating.” The SDT assumes that people hold three central beliefs: who they are (actual self), who they would like to be (ideal self), and who they ought to be (ought self). The ought self is almost always observed from a third party. An ideal discrepancy is present when the actual self does not match the ideal self, and it generally represents the absence of a desired outcome. For example, “my actual body is short but I would like to be tall”. When the actual self is different than the ought self, an ought discrepancy occurs; ought discrepancies represent the presence or threat of a negative outcome. For example, “my actual body is round but my parents think it should be slender.” When an individual is exposed to a discrepancy, they experience emotional distress.

The application to television is this: habitual contact with social information that supports the thin-ideal (which mediates an ideal or ought discrepancy) could make body related self-discrepancies chronically accessible, thus leading to repeated negative effects and patterns of disordered eating (Harrison). Harrison’s study that concluded, however, that the prediction was supported by exposure to television, but not by magazine.

Fashion magazines are a primary promoter of underweight being a normal, healthy physical state. From 1956 through 2005, Seventeen and YM magazine were analyzed for their written, internal content of dieting, exercise, or both. The general conclusion was that written content related to exercise increased in Seventeen, and content related to dieting increased on a parabolic curve over time in both magazines. The average model size increased in YM, but there was no change in Seventeen over a forty-nine-year period. Regardless, “models are so thin that it is almost impossible for women to achieve that which is presented as ideal without resorting to extreme measures” (Luff and Gray 1). In another study conducted, it was found that “fashion magazines averaged 14.8 articles over 6 months on weight reduction compared with 11.2 and 5.7 articles in traditional and modern magazines, respectively” (Benowitz-Fredericks et al. 695). It can be concluded that magazines do not have as significant of an effect on the population as television, but they are indeed furthering the distribution of the thin ideal.

Culture magnifies preexisting dissatisfactions, which cause eating disorder pathology to present itself in extreme outlets; this expression is due to the misinterpreted idea that the affected cannot pursue their “ideal” body through any other means that will be as effective as an eating disorder. Western culture, when compared to Latino and African cultures, proves to be more apt at breeding eating disorders. After viewing slides containing a mixture of mass media thin ideals and controls, African-American women reported no changes from pre- to post body dissatisfaction, while Caucasian women reported a significantly increased magnitude of body dissatisfaction (Debraganza and Hausenblas). In Cuban women, levels of media exposure had no relationship to the incidence of EDs (Jane, Hunter, and Lozzi). It is postulated that the culture of abundance should not be held as a major factor contributing to ED pathology, for “such a culture may value slimness, but whether a particular individual takes this valuation to a pathological extreme depends on additional factors” (Polivy and Herman 192). Previously in the paper it was proved that while cognition mandates the intrapersonal function of the individual, these factors have little to no effect without exacerbation from sociocultural factors. Thus, as the world becomes westernized, the culture begins to be adopted across ethnicities where the “thin ideal” has not necessarily permeated, and in turn increases the pathology of EDs.

Eating disorders are caused by a perverse collaboration of neurocognitive and sociocultural factors, but it is rather difficult to directly say which factor is primary. Within the neurocognitive realm, cognitive aberrations and body dissatisfaction contribute to the development of an eating disorder in an interesting way: they do not have binary relationships. Both can contribute to an eating disorder independent of the other’s existence, but they also appear to depend on one another. Body dissatisfaction is the most cited cause for the development of eating disorders, but it can exist whether the physiology and biochemistry are imbalanced or not. It is worth noting that strictly physiological factors can breed an eating disorder independent of unregulated chemistry, though they seem to magnify in effect when acting together. In contrast to this, the identified sociocultural factors were indeed binary. In analyzing the discourses of media and culture at large, it was found that the sociocultural premise is either effective or it is not.

If this paper is treated as a mathematical model for the development of eating disorders, it would be most appropriate to treat the sociocultural factor as a constant, for it is always present as a punitive ideal, while the independent variable is how one reacts to it based on their neural physiology. Although it has been necessary to simplify sociocultural effects in this paper, it is mandatory to understand the sociocultural determinations and psychological consequences of these injurious ideals.

Often an eating disorder is perpetuated as a cry for attention, a rebellious act, or an outright nuisance, but what if it is something more? What if something rampant is running through the minds of five percent of the world’s population that is more than a simple choice to not eat? The answers are right in front of us, begging to be discovered.

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