Women are constantly bombarded with pressure to meet society’s unrealistic standards of a beautiful girl. Somehow the word beautiful gets translated to skinny in the minds of young girls. This distorted belief has captivated people’s lives causing them to develop an obsession with thinness, food, and their bodies.
What aggravates me most about this is that eating disorders are so common yet no one really seems to do anything to try and fix it. Eating disorders are everywhere and unlike a headache or stomach ache you can’t just take Advil to make it go away. So sorry society, I’m breaking the silence and finally talking about the worlds secret illness.
There are three types of eating disorders, anorexia, which a person eats a very small amount and obtains an extremely low weight, bulimia, a disorder where food is binged and then purged either through restriction, vomiting or exercise and binge eating disorder (BED), which also consists of binging but no purge. Many people assume that a person only has an eating disorder if they don’t eat, which is completely false. Binge Eating Disorder is actually the most common eating disorder in the world. A person can look completely healthy and have an eating disorder which makes it easy for people to hide their disorders for years.
A college lifestyle is known as “the perfect storm” for eating disorders. According to the National Eating Disorder Association 10-20% of female college students suffer from an eating disorder. This high percentage has to do with the fact that students are now on their own stressing over workload, experiencing anxiety and busy schedules making it hard to sit down and eat. Instead of growing that percentage, we should be destroying it.
So, if you are suffering from an eating disorder please, know you are not alone. You are beautiful, you are strong and you WILL recover. Do not be ashamed of yourself and try to ignore the thought that you have a problem. Reach out for help, do not let your disorder take over your life. I PROMISE that asking for help is the most powerful thing you can do.