Definition of Eating Disorders

Eating disorders are a group of serious conditions in which you're so preoccupied with food and weight that you can often focus on little else. The main types of eating disorders are :

• Anorexia nervosa, in which you become too thin, but you don't eat enough because you think you are fat

• Bulimia nervosa, involving periods of overeating followed by purging, sometimes through self-induced vomiting or using laxatives
• Binge-eating, which is out-of-control eating

Women are more likely than men to have eating disorders. Following two factors demonstrate how common this problem is:

• Statistics show that 1 in 5 women suffer from an eating disorder.

• Eating disorder 24 million American and 70 million worldwide.
  

Eating disorder is a sever behavior problem. Eating disorders can cause heart and kidney problems and even death.

http://eatingdisorderinfo.org/

http://www.nlm.nih.gov/medlineplus/eatingdisorders.html

National Eating Disorder Awareness week

The week of February 28 to March 6, 2010 is National Eating Disorders Awareness Week, so I dedicate my blog to eating disorder. Please take some time to learn or review your knowledge on eating disorders in order to recognize someone around you may be at risk. According National Eating Disorders Association, there are 10 million female and 1 million males are suffering eating disorders from various degrees such as struggling with binge eat to a life and death fight. Therefore, this topic should raise more awareness.

The profile of this disorder was a teenage white girl in the middle to upper class socioeconomic group. However, recently eating disorders are spreading to young children and adults with all socioeconomic groups and of all ethnic groups as social normal obsessed on slim appearance. The multimedia are filled with skinny, “beautiful” celebrities. We have to educate our youth to realize the unrealistic body images of media. And more urgently we have to take action to advocate the media to play a responsible role, replacing the skinny body images to diverse body images to help our youth to feel more positive about their own images.

The two important things to teach youth to prevent eating disorders are self love and eat health. Nature is beauty, so to love your body and accept everything about yourself is the philosophy of life and also the best defense to against eating disorder. To maintain their daily activities, teenage girls need 2000 calories a day.

I invited you join me to raise our community’s awareness on eating disorders.