Agata Augustyniak English 11 Block 1A April 30, 2013
According to Barack Obama, “Change will not come if we wait for some other person or some other time; we are the ones we've been waiting for, we are the change that we seek”. Eating disorders are hazardous illnesses that affect people in today’s society (Sargent 1). Most of them are caused by cultural pressures that eulogize "thinness" and place value on obtaining the "perfect body" (Sargent 1). Another factor that causes those horrible disorders are narrow definitions of beauty that include only women and men of specific body weights and shapes (Sargent 1). People with eating disorders often use food in an attempt to compensate for feelings and emotions that may otherwise seem overwhelming (Sargent 1). For some, dieting, bingeing, and purging may begin as a way to cope with painful emotions and to feel in control of one’s life, but ultimately, these behaviors will damage a person’s physical and emotional health, and sense of competence and control (Sargent 1). Anorexia nervosa, an eating disorder, causes losing weight, dying people and starving people. Yearly, almost 500000 people visit websites promoting anorexia, according to researches (Laurance 16). A big number of teenage girls have anorexia issues just because of what they read or saw while looking through those dangerous sites (Laurance 16). Websites that promote eating disorders, such as anorexia, are visited by thousands of people every day (Laurance 16). Such websites talk about how to stay thin, and also how to adhere to a 400-500 calories diet, even though a regular woman diet should contain 2000 calories daily, and a man diet should contain 2500 calories daily (Laurance 16). They also promote an image of a thin body through pictures of models or actresses wearing a popular size zero, which has abysmal consequences (Laurance 16). Many people focus on purging, starving and using laxatives and diet pills (Laurance 16). Men and women that meet on websites promoting anorexia often talk out how to get thinner, and sometimes, they even meet up in order to see each other’s “perfect” bodies, and compare which one of them presents better (Laurance 16). Danielle Segal is a 19-year-old model who was hospitalized twice for malnutrition and shed one fourth of her weight (Cheslow 1). She was never obese, yet she was told she was too fat to become a model (Cheslow 1). Feeling pressure to become skinnier, Danielle lost a lot of weight and ended up weighting 40 kilograms while being 1.7 meters tall (Cheslow 1). Passed in Israel legislation states that the emphasis put on thin bodies should be stopped because it often causes many eating disorders among people all over the world (Cheslow 1) . The new law was important in Israel, where people are obsessed with models whose pictures are on TV and in magazines (Cheslow 1). It requires all models to have a medical report no older than three months, which states that they are not malnourished by WHO standards (Cheslow 1). When asked, model Segal says she is happy with the new law and she realizes that if it was passed years ago, her way of perceiving the real beauty would be various (Cheslow 1). A few years old girl standing by the slide in her bathing suit is anxiously gazing at one of other girls tummy, and she gets upset about her appearance (Maziarz 1). “A while ago girls did not worry about how their bodies looked
