Anorexia Nervosa Throughout History

Voltaire once said, “Nothing would be more tiresome than eating and drinking if God had not made them a pleasure as well as a necessity.” This quote makes me remember that as much pleasure food may bring us, we should never forget that we need it to survive. I guessed most of us don’t, but once again, I remembered there are some people that do. If we were to look the world as a whole, we would realize that from every 100 teenage girls, 1 to 5 suffers from anorexia.
As defined by the National Eating Disorders Association, “Anorexia Nervosa is a serious, potentially life-threatening eating disorder characterized by self-starvation and excessive weight loss.” (NEDA). The term “Anorexia Nervosa” literally means “neurotic loss of appetite”, and could be more generally defined as the result of a prolonged self-starvation and an unhealthy relationship regarding food and self-image. It is characterized by “resistance to maintaining body weight at or above a minimally normal weight for age and height”, “intense fear of weight gain or being “fat”, even though underweight”, “disturbance in the experience of body weight or shape, undue influence of weight or shape on self-evaluation, or denial of the seriousness of low body weight”, and “loss of menstrual periods in girls and women post-puberty.”(NEDA) Among women on a range of 15 to 24 years old, AN has been proved to have 12 times the annual mortality rate of all death causes, and from premature deaths of anorexic patients, 1 in every 5 is caused by suicide, which gives a rise of 20% for suicide probability. (EDV)

Looking the historical moment we are living at, it is undeniable that the media plays a crucial role on who we are both as individuals and as a society, and how we look at the...

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... then he or she may as well chose to vomit that food. This can be showed and further explained once again, referring to Catherine. The Church, fearing a possible heretic, had men who watched her and ordered her to eat. At the beginning, she accepted because if she didn’t she would have been accused of being a witch (the worst offence possible during the time), and possibly tortured or murdered. But she was not able to endure the presence of food in her body and purged everything she ate. (Bell)
Purging was used as an indirect way of restricting food, when “forced” to eat by convenience, or avoidance of uncomfortable situations. This proves that eating is something under absolute control of the individual, because both by restricting food, and when obliged to eat, by vomiting that food, the individual is able to control what goes, and stays inside his or her body.