Dying To Be Thin Summary

While in a lecture hall of about one hundred students – realize that three out of those one hundred students are struggling with either Bulimia or Anorexia-Nervosa, the most dangerous eating disorder in the world. The documentary, “Dying To Be Thin,” first airing in 2000 and created by NOVA, dig deeper into the world of what the concept “having an eating disorder” is truly about. With the ages fifteen to twenty-four being the most vulnerable ages to form an eating disorder, the documentary explores women like “Heidi,” who died at the age of twenty-two, and a woman named “Katy,” who overcame her Anorexia and found new passions in life. The pressure to be thin in our society is already very extreme but when men and women engage in activities

In the fourteenth century, thirty-three year old, “St. Katherine” starved herself to death. This illness is certainly is not solely a physical illness; eating disorders are mental illnesses as well. The documentary also introduces a young, fourteen year old girl named “Erin.” “Erin” is shown at the beginning of the documentary looking into a mirror and writing words like “fat, ugly, disappointment” on it because she felt those words described her. “Erin” was disgusted by herself, she hated herself, and it is clear to see that during this scene. Davis sat in silence while watching this part, in his and my later interview he expressed his sadness saying, “I hate to see someone hate him or herself to that extent. I feel like no one should have to live being disgusted by themselves the way she seems to be.” “Erin” had been starving herself for three months, leaving her at 20% below normal weight for her gender, age, and height. “Erin” was dying of malnutrition because of her irrational fear of fat. The irrational fear of fat that “Erin” obtained was not a result of her desire to be what she saw on the billboards, what she saw in the magazines, but because she was aiming to become so thin that she would look unattractive. “Erin” was controlled by her fears, by her anxieties because she was sexually abused, she admitted. After being sexually abused, “Erin” felt like she had control of nothing,

I didn’t think there was anything wrong with it because it was on TV.” Said a woman featured in the documentary, “Dying To Be Thin,” as she speaks of the beginning of her struggle with a binge eating disorder. According to the National Eating Disorder Association, a binge eating disorder is defined as: “recurrent episodes of eating large quantities of food (often very quickly and to the point of discomfort).” Women and men with binge eating disorders often times do not stick out as much as those with an eating disorder such as Anorexia, because most often they sit at a healthy weight. The people with this specific eating disorder continuously find themselves eating to the point of sickness and following with a purge, or making themselves throw up. “One thing that really stuck out to me in the documentary,” said Davis, “is, I didn’t realize that the brain becomes so affected by binge eating that your body eventually adjusts to where they can’t really feel full.” Biologically, the body, in the case of a binge eating disorder, confuses the hypothalamus, which is the part of the brain that controls hunger and appetite; by misunderstanding when exactly the subject is “full,” they tend to eat more than the appropriate amount. On another hand, people with a Binge eating disorder have been found to have low levels of serotonin, making them more prone to depression, but as they binge it has been proven to increase those