Social Media s National Eating Disorder Awareness Week

A pint of Ben Jerry’s Half Baked ice cream has a total of 270 calories in it. One bag of potato chips contains 1,217 calories and four cookies from a Chips Ahoy! box are worth 190 calories. Numbers, they’re just numbers. Yet we focus so stringently on numbers. Weight, calories, miles, minutes, they’re all just numbers. Kenny walks into the gym and starts to lace up his sneakers. Looking around the gym, he sees several of his buddies benching 200+ pounds. Man, wish I could be that strong, he thinks to himself as he heads to the treadmill. Kenny’s a runner, always has been, always will be. When he looks in the mirror, he doesn’t see that his ribs are so prominent it looks like the skin’s going to give way. All he sees is fat and all he†¦show more content†¦Holistically, eating disorders include ramped up emotions, beliefs, and behaviors regarding diet and weight. There are various forms of the disorder, but the two most heavily thought of are anorexia nervosa and bulimia nervosa. Anorexia Nervosa, according to the National Eating Order organization website, involves self-starvation, rapid weight loss and can be life threatening. Likewise, bulimia nervosa also is life threatening and can be characterized by a pattern of binge eating followed by self-inflicted vomiting. In the mind of someone who’s suffering bulimia, this purging of a meal is compensating for the calories, the numbers. Currently, there is no known cause of why eating disorders form in their victims, but social constructs of ideal body weight play a seemingly dangerous role in their manifestation. Despite the latest focus on the societally born problem, I personally feel like another form of an eating disorder has gone overlooked. Now, eating disorders on the whole are a huge problem plaguing the health and minds of our society, but awareness needs to be raised about all of its cancerous ways. Anorexia Athletica is characterized by excessive or compulsive exercise and is not considered a form of a mental health issue formally. Differing opinions aside, excessive exercising frequently co-occurs with eating disorders. In addition, studies have found that