Anorexia

The nervous anorexia, according to experts, can be considered as an alteration by defect of the habits and behaviors involved with the alimentation. The persons who suffer this disorder dedicate most of there time to topics related with food. The constant concern of food and the fear of gaining weight are the principal elements of this disorder, along with the personal insecurity to affront this problem. They deny the disease and consider them selves fat in any parte of their body´s despite of presenting an esqueletic figure. There could be some problems such as menstrual irregularities and later on amenorrhea or impotence in men.

From a sociological point of view, anorexia is a trendy disease that appears since the 80´s as a phenomenon of modernity, but in the 90´s it is spread to the rest of the world thanks to the globalization. The tendency is generated by the mass media and publicity, where beauty is sold as a model of thinness under a cultural image imposed by brands like Barbie’s which created a social-cultural change in peoples conceptions of beauty, not considering that this bodies are biologically impossible to accomplish.

I decided to write this essay about anorexia because I personally suffered with this disorder. I was 14 years old, in an age where we seek for social approval, especially of those who are youngest. My childhood was filled with insecurities, maybe this triggered such an auto destructive behavior in me, making me obsessed with having a more thinner body, when I didn’t really have any extra weight. This obsession got to the extreme where I would constantly look in the mirror and weight myself every day, I even use to frequently measure my body with a meter; by the time when I was really sick I was weighting 80 pounds being 5 feet tall and my waist measured 58 cm, the bones of my face stuck out and my skin color was a shade of paled yellow. Doing this investigation I noticed that most of the people that suffer this eating disorder tend to have very strict personalities, for example, they feel guilt when they eat because they think they failed them selves, they push their body´s to the limit “no pain no gain” the more your mussels hurt the more proud you get.

In these days, I don’t understand why I went through this faze, why I became so sick or ended up hurting myself; the more I analyze, I realize its not completely my fault, I’m just another victim of a system that plays with our minds to achieve merely consumerists gold’s. In order to overcome this illness, I had to understand, that I am worth more then my exterior, and that being beautiful doesn’t mean portraying an unhealthy image, we should dig in our inside, and find our virtues and learn to love them, only then, we could race awareness about the cultural manipulations and stop being a victim of a superficial system.