The book Stick Figure A Diary Of My Former Self is a personal journal written by Lori Gottlieb when she was 11 years old suffering from anorexia nervosa. “Anorexia nervosa is an eating disorder that causes people to obsess about their weight and the food they eat.” (mayclinic.com) Most eating disorders are physiological due to friends and family, stress, and the social media. Anorexia nervosa, like all other eating disorders, is extremely dangerous and unhealthy for the human body to endure. Although eating disorders are destructive to one's life, is there explainable reasoning behind why a person may have one? “I wish to be the thinnest girl at school, or maybe the thinnest 11 year old on the entire planet.” (Lori Gottlieb) Lori is a fun, loving, and intelligent straight A student. In fact, she is so intelligent that even adults consider her to be an outcast. She grows up in Beverly Hills, California with her self-centered mother, distant father, careless brother, and best friend, Chrissy, whom is a parakeet. Through her self-conscious mother, maturing friends, and her friend’s mother’s obsession with dieting, she becomes more aware of her body and physical appearance. Something that once meant nothing to Lori now is her entire world. She started off by just skipping breakfast on her family vacation to Washington, D.C., soon to escalate to one meal a day, and eventually hardly anything other than a few glasses of water. Lori’s friends at school begin to compliment her weight loss and beg for her advice on how she did so. But as Lori once read in one of her many dieting books, her dieting skills are her “little secret”, and she intends on keeping it that way. It is said, “Women continue to follow the standards of the ideal thi... ... middle of paper ... ...e writes “I figured most of my blood was in my heart, but all my ribs were in the way, I swear I have like a thousand ribs. But then I felt my stomach, and I knew exactly where to cut. I wanted to cut all the fat off my body so people like Leslie wouldn’t say I looked fat at my funeral.” (Gottlieb, 191) Works Cited Citations “Definition.” Mayo Clinic. ED. Mayo Clinic Staff. Mayo Foundation for Medical Education and Research, 05 Jan.2012. Web. 03 Dec 2013. Williams, Alex. “Before Spring Break, The Anorexic Challenge.” Race, Class, and Gender In the United States. Ninth ed. New York: Worth, 2014. 468-71. Print. Hesse-Biber, Sharlene. “Am I Thin Enough Yet?” Race, Class, and Gender In The United States. Ninth Ed. New York: Worth, 2014. 595-602. Print. Gottlieb, Lori. Stick Figure A Diary Of My Former Self. New York: Simon & Schuster Paperbacks, 2000. Print.
In the article, “Too ‘Close to the Bone’: The Historical Context for Women’s Obsession with Slenderness,” Roberta Seid goes in depth on the emotionally straining and life altering trials women take on to try to portray society’s “ideal” body over time. She delves far into the past, exposing our culture’s ideal body image and the changes it has gone through over time. The article brings to light the struggles of striving to be the perfect woman with the model body. On the other hand, in the article “Rethinking Weight”, author Amanda Spake, details the many differing views of obesity. Spake voices her opinion on the idea that being overweight, and not losing weight, is caused by laziness. “Too Close to the Bone” and “Rethinking Weight” both deliberate about weight issues that are
Staff, Mayo Clinic. "Definition." Mayo Clinic. Mayo Foundation for Medical Education and Research, 08 Apr. 2011. Web. 28 Nov. 2013.
Anorexia Nervosa may be described directly as an eating disease classified by a deficit in weight, not being able to maintain weight appropriate for one’s height. Anorexia means loss of appetite while Anorexia Nervosa means a lack of appetite from nervous causes. Before the 1970s, most people never heard of Anorexia Nervosa. It was identified and named in the 1870s, before then people lived with this mental illness, not knowing what it was, or that they were even sick. It is a mental disorder, which distorts an individual’s perception of how they look. Looking in the mirror, they may see someone overweight
Lifestyle choices are and should be subject to scrutiny. People should be able to defend who they are. Indeed, the author even critiques the lifestyle of healthy and skinny people. Offering no real solutions, Mary Ray Worley is another angry soul shouting into the wind, telling the real world that she will not conform. Although she does have some valid points in her article, she needs to support her claims with facts instead of her own opinions.
staff, Mayo. "Definition." Mayo Clinic. Mayo Foundation for Medical Education and Research, 9 Aug. 2012. Web. 12 Nov. 2013. . (tags: none | edit tags)
Lauren Williams and John Germov (2004)”The Thin Ideal: Women, Food, and Dieting”, in Lauren Williams and John Germov (Editors) A Sociology of Food and Nutrition. The Social Appetite, Oxford: Oxford University Press, 342
staff, Mayo. "Definition." Mayo Clinic. Mayo Foundation for Medical Education and Research, 2 Apr. 2011. Web. 21 Nov. 2013. .
Eating Disorders." Current Issues: Macmillian Social Science Library. Detroit: Gale, 2010. Gale Opposing Viewpoints In Context. Web. 20 Oct. 2015.
It is no wonder that many girls are anorexic: it is from the media. The media’s promotion of super-skinny models has lead many young girls to believe that they are nothing. This is not true, and yet the media promotes it. The image of being “thin and beautiful” pushes young women to diet, which, in their attempt to fit into the “mold” of the model, may lead to anorexia. Approximately one to three percent of women in the United States are anorexic (Cha 1). Clothing companies, such as Calvin Klein, are to blame for this growing epidemic.
Today, as many as 10 out of 100 young teens struggle with an eating disorder. Each year, many teens develop eating disorders, or problems related to their weight, body image, and food. Anorexia is a serious eating disorder associated with an intense fear of weight gain and food. People who suffer from anorexia limit the amount of food they eat and have a distorted view of their body size and shape and may become dangerously thin. That is because the disorder affects not only their body but also their mind. Although the cause of anorexia is not fully understood, there is evidence that physical, biological, and social triggers are part of problems in anorexia. All of these causes revolve around the society we are living in today.
Chapter 25 mentions how, "anorexia and bulimia have emerged as a major health and social problems as well as bulimia affects 13 percent of college students, anorexia was 0.6 percent among college students and how the mortality rate of anorexia was 6 to 20 percent whereas; bulimia appears to be less life-threatening" (Chapter 25, pg. 286). Chapter 25 also mentions how, "eating disorders are most common among young, white middle to upper class women" (Chapter 25, pg. 286).
Libal, Autumn. "The Poor Get Fat, The Rich Get Thin?" Social Discrimination & Body Size: Too Big to FIt? 2005. 40-55. Print. 10 Nov. 2013.
10.) Staff, Mayo Clinic. "Definition." Mayo Clinic. Mayo Foundation for Medical Education and Research, 29 Dec. 2011. Web. 11 Oct. 2013. .
"Overweight High School Students." Gale Opposing Viewpoints in Context. Detroit: Gale, 2010. Opposing Viewpoints in Context. Web. 20 May 2014.
A study shows that 44% of Latino high school students aim to lose weight due to the representations of media and stereotypes. This study also shows that these students turn to extreme measures of weight loss such as vomiting and laxative abuse. The need for these students to lose weight as quickly as they can, are caused by how the media presents what is attractive and what is not - for example, women in the media are shown to be thinner than average (Lopez et al.,