In America today, we often here of people who suffer daily from illnesses such as cancer and AIDS. What we don’t often here about is the illness that takes away millions and millions of Americans each year, that being eating disorders(Understanding…). But, what does that term eating disorders mean. Think about it…. Did your answer center around, food, weight or dieting? If so, then you understand something about the symptoms of an eating disorder. But if that's all you're thinking about, you may be unaware of the underlying causes of this disease. One of the biggest causes of this sometimes-fatal disease has to do with body image. The impact of a disturbance in body image on a person’s life may be frustrating or debilitating depending on how severe the disturbance is. A large percentage of men and women in our culture struggle with dissatisfaction with some aspect of their appearance. Kim Chernin supports this point by stating, “One women disliked her thighs, another her stomach, a third the loose flesh under her arms. Many would grab their skin and squeeze it as we talked, with the grimace of distaste language cannot translate into itself.”(58). In 1996, a survey found that fifty-six percent of women and forty-three percent of men disliked their overall appearance with an even larger percentage dissatisfied with individual attributes such as weight and mid torso(Understanding…). A person with an eating disorder typically suffers from a body image disturbance that can impact many areas of his or her life.Most women are given the message at a very young age that in order to be happy and successful, they must be thin. Every time you walk into a store you are surrounded by the images of emaciated models that appear on the front cover of all fashion magazines. Thousands of teenage girls are starving themselves this very minute trying to attain what the fashion industry considers to be the "...
